Hi Chary and all, Chary Chary <[email protected]> writes:
> yes, thanks for your patience. Sorry if I did not express myself correctly > initially. You got me right with small corrections. I want: > > - a single report > > - that shows the change in your assets and Liabilities between two points > in time > > - grouped into Accounts (line with the balance) command > > - which includes unrealized gains and losses > > - where the total reflects the overall change OK, after thinking through this a bunch more, and getting myself fairly confused, I believe I have convinced myself that what you're looking for doesn't make sense yet. Here's the problem. You want a report that lumps together two kinds of changes during a specific time period: actual transactions, recorded in a specific currency (say, USD) and potential gains/losses due to changes of prices in commodities during that period, including alternate currencies (say, EUR). But these two kinds of changes are orthogonal to one another and it's not yet clear how they should interact. For example, say you gain 1000 USD in income during that period. What's the right way to understand that change in terms of EUR? Should we value the 1000 in EUR on the date that you took it in, and use that number in a running total of EUR gained and lost throughout the period? Or should we continue to think of it as 1000 USD until the very end of the period in question, and then convert the running total to EUR using the exchange rate at the end of the period? It seems that you can *either* ask the question: (1) How did my *actual* assets change during a specific *period* in time? or: (2) Given my actual assets at a specific *point* in time, what potential gains/losses would I incur by converting those assets to another commodity (say, another currency) *at that point in time*? but I don't think it makes sense to ask: (3) How did my assets, including *unrealized* (i.e., potential) gains/losses due to currency conversions, change during a specific period? In other words, I don't think it makes sense to talk about how the *unrealized* value of assets *changed* over a period in time. Or at least, it doesn't make sense until you make some decisions about how to define the non-actual value of assets at different points in time. You can answer question (1) in a variety of ways. The easiest one is just: ledger bal Assets -b begin_date -e end_date (Note: begin_date must be some time *after* your opening balances, if you only want to see changes, not the full total for the account on the day before end_date.) If you want a breakdown of where those changes come from, you might find this version more helpful: ledger reg Assets -b begin_date -e end_date --related --subtotal On the other hand, using -b/-e with -X and --unrealized doesn't seem to make sense, as I explained above (although ledger happily accepts them both, probably because it uses one of the specific interpretations I mentioned to understand your non-actual assets across a given period). To answer question (2), you need something like: ledger bal Assets --unrealized -X some_commodity perhaps adding --now=... or -e end_date if you want to know your unrealized gains/losses in some_commodity at a point in time other than right now. Does this make sense? -- Best, Richard -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ledger" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
