Hey, Marcin- I'm sorry for not replying sooner! I meant to reply but then your message got lost in my inbox & I forgot about it until now. :(
> I would like to separate these two areas in Ledger, too. Ideally, I'd > like to be able to see a "private" report, a "business" report or > a "total" report. I just started using ledger earlier this year to help my wife manage the books for her contracting business. Here's what I've come up with so far; works for us, but like you I'm interested in hearing if others have other tips for making this easier: * In my top-level directory I have two files named 2019.ledger and 2020.ledger, and two directories named 2019/ and 2020/. 2019.ledger looks like this (2020.ledger looks similar): include 2019/business.ledger include 2019/personal.ledger * 2019/business.ledger looks like this: include business-opening-balance.ledger 2019-01-01 * Secretary of State Expense:<business name>:Articles of Incorporation $250.00 Asset:<business name>:Checking 2019-01-15 * Client #1 Asset:<business name>:Checking $1,000.00 Income:<business name>:<client name>:<project name> 2019-01-15 * My Wife Expense:<business name>:Payroll $500.00 Asset:<business name>:Checking ... * 2019/business-opening-balance.ledger looks like this: 2019-01-01 * Opening balance Asset:<business name>:Checking $0.00 Equity:<business name>:Opening Balance:2019 * 2019/personal.ledger looks like this: include personal-opening-balance.ledger 2019-01-15 * My Wife Asset:Personal:Checking $500.00 Income:<business name>:Salary ... * 2019/personal-opening-balance.ledger looks like this: 2019-01-01 * Opening balance Asset:Personal:Checking $1,234.56 Asset:Personal:Savings $9,876.54 Equity:Personal:Opening Balance:2019 Hopefully, that gives you some idea of how you can manage business & personal finances in separate files but still combine them to give a picture of your overall finances. If you want to see all of your 2019 balances you run: ledger -f 2019.ledger balance. If you want to see only your 2019 business balances you run: ledger -f 2019/business.ledger balance. In my opinion, the two keystones that hold everything together are the liberal use of ledger's include directive, and the use of Personal or <business name> as the 2nd-level account name in all transactions. What I discovered through trial and error is that having that 2nd-level disambiguator is really useful when you need to track the flow of money from the business account to your personal account: Income:<biz>:... => Asset:<biz>:Checking => Expense:<biz>:Payroll => Income:<biz>:Salary => Asset:Personal:Checking. Things that I don't like about this scheme are: 1) I have to manually compare Expense:<biz>:Payroll and Income:<biz>:Salary in balance reports to confirm they balance to zero, 2) I have to be extra diligent about entering payroll in both the business & personal ledger files without interruption or else I'll forget where I left off and then have to compare the two side-by-side in my text editor to make sure I didn't miss any transactions. For 1) I don't think you can avoid having to manually compare the two, because if you actually synthesize transactions that balance automatically then I think it makes your job harder at tax time when you need to figure out your total payroll expense for the year. If I'm wrong about that and there is a way to create transactions that balance automatically and have a way for ledger to report the total cost of one expense category I'd love to hear it! For 2) I think that's just the cost of trying to track business & personal expenses in separate files, and at this point I've built up enough scripting to help automate a lot of my workflow that it's not been a problem for me in a while. Hope that helps! I'm happy to answer questions you may have if I did a poor job explaining any parts of that, and I'd also love to hear other hints & tips others might have to improve it. Best, Kent -- --- 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/1598505268.390118884%40apps.rackspace.com.
