Welcome to Ledger!
To answer your first question, ledger won't mind if you specify your
transactions that way. Personally I prefer to use positive numbers and
think instead about where the money is moving, but to each their own.
For the second you can use account assertions. Maybe something like this?
account Expenses:Clothes
assert date < [2017-01-01] or date > [2017-05-30]
and repeat for each account. You could also add an opposite assertion for
the Study Abroad versions.
On Mon, Jan 2, 2017 at 2:47 PM ubeatlenine <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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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