I'm currently attempting to set up an envelope budget, as described in
various links from plaintextaccounting.org. In pursuit of this, I've set up
the following automatic transaction:
= expr (account =~ /^Expenses:/ and commodity == "$" and date >= [2016-11-01
])
[Budgeted:$account] -1.0
[Budget] 1.0
This does what I want it to do, viz. create matching entries under the
[Budgeted] account tree for each manual transaction under Expenses.
The problem is that my Expenses account tree is several layers deep, and so
there are now dozens of entries in all of those layers for [Budgeted]. I
could budget at this granularity if I wanted, but it's more work than I
prefer. What I'd like to be able to do is to budget to only the top-level
children of Expenses, and let all the children deduct from those budget
accounts automatically. E.g., where currently this transaction creates
separate entries for [Budgeted:Expenses:Food:Meals] and
[Budgeted:Expenses:Food:Groceries], I'd like both to act on
[Budgeted:Expenses:Food], such that I don't have to either budget
separately for restaurants and groceries, or manually move funds from
[Budgeted:Expenses:Food] to the more detailed accounts. (It would also be
nice not to have the extraneous "Expenses" in [Budgeted:Expenses:Food], but
this is comparatively minor.)
I can't find any way to alter what goes in $account in the above automatic
transaction. The manual only provides the single use case $account, and
doesn't elucidate on the underlying mechanism. I could use an external tool
for this (editing the ledger file with automatically-generated budget
transactions), but I'd prefer not to clutter up the file. Is there a way to
do this?
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