On Wednesday, 31 May 2017 18:58:10 UTC+1, John Wiegley wrote:
>
> >>>>> "PM" == Peter McArthur <[email protected] <javascript:>> writes:
>
> PM> The manual shows us how unclear the semantics are. Most people seem to
> use
> PM> auxiliary dates as a date when a cheque is *cleared*. But the manual
> also
> PM> shows them being used when a cheque is *paid*:
>
> It should be noted here that one of the "features" of Ledger is that it
> leaves
> as much of the semantics of your accounting as possible up to you.
Yes, the semantics are up to you, but you can only have one kind of
auxiliary date. That’s quite a restriction. If you’ve used auxiliary dates
to spread your payment to Bountiful Blessing Farm over time, as the manual
suggest, you can’t also use them to mark when a cheque cleared.
Compare that to tags. While there are two special tags called * and !,
there's nothing they can do that other tags can't, as far as I'm aware. For
instance, this:
2017-05-20 McDonald’s
food and drink £ -1.99
*** current account £ 1.99
$ ledger -f journal balance *--cleared*
17-May-20 McDonald’s current account £ 1.99
£ 1.99
$ ledger -f journal balance *--uncleared*
17-May-20 McDonald’s food and drink £ -1.99
£ -1.99
Is pretty much the same as this:
2017-05-20 McDonald’s
food and drink £ -1.99
current account £ 1.99 *; :cleared:*
$ ledger -f journal balance *%/cleared/*
17-May-20 McDonald’s current account £ 1.99
£ 1.99
$ ledger -f journal balance *'not(%/cleared/)'*
17-May-20 McDonald’s food and drink £ -1.99
£ -1.99
I would like to similar freedom with dates.
This is a reason why beancount was created: To choose the best notion of
> what things mean in a financial setting, and then to impose those semantics
> to help you avoid errors.
I'm not experienced with beancount but, so I may have misunderstood you,
but I don't really see what you're getting at. Power and flexibility are
good. The ability to add constraints is also good. They work best when used
together.
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