Thanks for the input André.
I didn't understand how installing the add-on failed. Any more details ?
Also, although I've been using and talking about these matched
assets/liabilities to and from zero transactions at year file boundaries for
years, until now I haven't heard of anybody else doing the same thing. Is the
technique useful enough to be a built-in command, or is everybody else doing
something different ? (for those of you just tuning in: see the hledger-equity
doc below for the use case).
Re two commands rather than one, I thought that running the "open" command
against the old journal might be a bit non-obvious:
hledger close -f 2016.journal assets liabilities # "makes sense"
hledger open -f 2016.journal assets liabilities # "weird, aren't I opening a
2017 journal ?"
Also, I thought that you would pretty much always be running "close" and then
"open", so why not make it a more convenient single command.
If two commands, "open" and "close" are nice easy words, but too overloaded
with other meanings, probably (?):
1. "Closing the books" has a definite meaning in accounting (see below)
2. opening and closing is a familiar operation on real-world accounts (creating
and destroying)
3. Beancount's journal format has open and close keywords for modelling 2,
which we might want to support in future
Other ideas besides your suggestion: zero/unzero ? tozero/fromzero ? tofromzero
? endingbalanceclopen ?
In Ledger and hledger this command uses a hard-coded "equity:..." account name
as the balancing account. Is that always what you want ? Is "equity" the right
word after all ? If someone could explain why it's the best name for this
command, I'll happily leave it alone.
About 1, accountingtools.com says:
Closing entries are journal entries used to empty temporary accounts at the end
of a reporting period and transfer their balances into permanent accounts. The
use of closing entries resets the temporary accounts to begin accumulating new
transactions in the next period. Otherwise, the balances in these accounts
would be incorrectly included in the totals for the following reporting period.
The basic sequence of closing entries is:
• Debit all revenue accounts and credit the income summary account,
thereby clearing out the balances in the revenue accounts.
• Credit all expense accounts and debit the income summary account,
thereby clearing out the balances in all expense accounts.
• Close the income summary account to the retained earnings account. If
there was a profit in the period, then this entry is a debit to the income
summary account and a credit to the retained earnings account. If there was a
loss in the period, then this entry is a credit to the income summary account
and a debit to the retained earnings account.
The net result of these activities is to move the net profit or loss for the
period into the retained earnings account, which appears in the stockholders'
equity section of the balance sheet.
Since the income summary account is only a transitional account, it is also
acceptable to close directly to the retained earnings account and bypass the
income summary account entirely.
Soo.. as usual, a bit different from our language. How do these people manage
without a hierarchical account names ? :) I guess "retained earnings" is a kind
of equity ?
Cc'ing the Ledger list for more advice.
> On Jan 1, 2017, at 9:03 AM, André Fincato <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> [I'm not an English native speaker]
>
> 1. I also think this should be a built-in feature! I did it manually myself
> today, and was good as a first-time exercise to understand the procedure, but
> having a command that does that automatically would be great.
> 2. I tried to install the add-on but did not succeed (got last in placing the
> file within the PATH variable)
> 3. `clopening` looks a bit weird IMHO, `equity` still sounds better though
> confusing to the actual actions done. Was thinking about that maybe it's
> clearer to have a command to close assets and equity balances and one to open
> them?
>
> What about `clear-out` and `clear-in` to respectively close a journal and
> opening a new one?
>
> On Monday, June 27, 2016 at 10:18:43 PM UTC+2, Simon Michael (sm) wrote:
> extra/hledger-equity.hs is similar to Ledger's "equity" command. Ours
> generates two opposite transactions that zero out and restore some account
> balances. More detail:
> hledger-equity [HLEDGEROPTS] [QUERY]
>
> Show a "closing balances" transaction that brings the balance of all
> accounts (or the matched accounts) to zero, and an opposite
> "opening balances" transaction that restores the balances from zero.
>
> The opening balances transaction is useful to carry over
> asset/liability balances if you choose to start a new journal file,
> eg at the beginning of the year.
>
> The closing balances transaction is useful to zero out balances in
> the old file, which gives you the option of reporting on both files
> at once while still seeing correct balances.
>
> Balances are calculated, and the opening transaction is dated, as of
> the report end date, which you should specify with -e or date: (and
> the closing transaction is dated one day earlier). If not specified,
> it defaults to today.
>
> If any matched account directly contains multiple commodities, the
> output may not be valid journal syntax, and will need some editing.
>
> Example:
> $ hledger equity -f 2015.journal -e 2016/1/1 assets liabilities >>2015.journal
> move opening balances txn to 2016.journal
>
> Open question: how to handle txns spanning a file boundary ? Eg:
> 2015/12/30 * food
> expenses:food:dining $10
> assets:bank:checking -$10 ; date:2016/1/4
>
>
> I think the "equity" name is unclear, and I'd like to call it something more
> descriptive. The best I've come up with is "clopening". Can you do better ?
> This one kind of exists: https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=clopening
> <https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=clopening>
>
> (I don't think it matters that we deviate from Ledger here; we can still
> support "equity" as an alias.)
>
> Also I was thinking this should be a built-in command instead of an add-on.
> Maybe that's true for other things in extra/ and elsewhere, I'm not really
> sure where to draw the line. Currently it's not that easy to
> discover/install/use add-ons, so having more things built in is convenient.
>
>
>
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