Hi,
First let me say that I've been very impressed with *ledger and the plain
text accounting community since I started using ledger last week. Ledger is
an insanely powerful tool that meshes perfectly with my usual way of doing
things (linux + emacs), and the helpful community has made keeping my new
year's resolutions easy. I do have a couple of questions about my ledger
file that I was not able to find by reading what I hoped would be relevant
sections of the manual:
1. The --invert option makes it easy to see where I've spent money and
where I have money, since it makes my expenses negative and my assets
positive. However, I would like a way to make this information equally as
obvious when skimming my ledger file. I was thinking about using he
following transaction format:
2017/01/01 * Grocery shopping
Expenses:Food:Groceries
Assets:Checking -$100.00
2017/01/02 * Payday
Assets:Checking $1000.00
Income:MyJob:Payroll
You can see that the amount associated with the asset is written out,
and the other amount is elided. I like this because when skimming my ledger
file, I know that a positive amount means I earned money, and a negative
amount means I spent money. What gave me pause is I didn't find this format
suggested in any of the online materials I read about plain text
accounting. Will this format lead ledger to make incorrect assumptions or
otherwise misrepresent my financial data in reports?
2. Soon I will be leaving to study abroad for a couple of months. To
track my expenses abroad, I was planning on setting up expense accounts
that are the same as my usual expense accounts, except they are all under
the "Study Abroad" category, like this:
; usual accounts
account Expenses:Clothes
account Expenses:Food:Groceries
account Expenses:Food:Eating Out
; study abroad accounts
account Expenses:Study Abroad:Clothes
account Expenses:Study Abroad:Food:Groceries
account Expenses:Study Abroad:Food:Eating Out
Now I'm certain that at some point, I am going to absentmindedly enter
an expense under Expenses:Clothes that should have been under Expenses:Study
Abroad:Clothes, which will result in inaccurate reports of how much I
spent abroad. To combat this, I was hoping to set up some type of check
that for every expense transaction between January 2017 and May 2017, the
expense account has to start with Expenses:Study Abroad, unless I
explicitly mark it with a piece of metadata that says otherwise. Is this
possible with ledger, or am I best off writing my own script to do this?
Thanks!
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