How complicated are your spending patterns? Thinking about John's wash sale example, I bet I could semi-automatically categorize most of my retail transactions by first extracting a map of Payee=>Account from my existing Ledger data. Then when I download a CSV file of new transactions from my bank or credit card company I could look up the vendor in that map and reuse the corresponding account for the new Ledger entry. I bet that would automatically cover 80% of my normal spending. e.g. Shell is always Expenses:Car:Fuel, McDonalds is always Expenses:Food:Dining Out while Whole Foods is always Expenses:Food:Groceries, Office Max is always Expenses:Office Supplies, etc. -----Original Message----- From: "o1bigtenor" <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, April 11, 2020 07:26 To: "o1bigtenor" <[email protected]>, [email protected] Subject: Re: Thank you, John & co.
On Sat, Apr 11, 2020 at 12:07 AM John Wiegley <[email protected]> wrote: > > >>>>> "o" == o1bigtenor <[email protected]> writes: > > o> When I look at a cashier's slip I can figure out what accounts things go > o> into - - - dunno how you'd be able to automate all of that - - - - well > o> maybe but that would mean having a complete copy of all the UAN and EAN (I > o> think that is what the US and the European bar code associations are) bar > o> codes. Might be a large assumption that one could make that an error free > o> process. > > You can also semi-automate. For example, I don't think that I can fully > automate the calculation of the Wash Sale Rule for capital loss transactions > followed by a repurchase of "the same equity or a substantially equivalent > instrument", since the government determines what equivalent means in that > context. > > However, I can maintain a small data file with wash sales from my broker > (which can also be downloaded as a tab-separated file), and then whenever my > code determines that a purchase is occurring, look to see whether there is an > applicable wash sale for that security on the given day. > > Perhaps you don't need all of UAN/EAN, but there's a way to download what you > do need, so that you only maintain that. > > The main idea here being: take whatever you do manually, and teach the > computer how to replicate as much of that activity as possible. > Hmmmmmmmmm - - - think I'm still stuck with manual entry for most of my transactions - - - - oh well. Thanks -- --- 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]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ledger-cli/CAPpdf5-5LkvpY-GZMSiKJzAvGdsu8X988ktsQr2-i-x6Y4P2nw%40mail.gmail.com. -- --- 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]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ledger-cli/1586623189.52511582%40apps.rackspace.com.
