Hi Benjamin
Welcome to the glorious world of plaintext accounting!
The main issue here is that "Assets:Checking $400" account. That exists because
in the `Opening Balance` transaction, you need at least two spaces between the
account name and the amount. Because there's only one space, at the moment
ledger thinks that transaction involves an account called "Assets:Checking
$400" with no amount specified.
So if you add at least one more space before "$400" that will fix that - but
you'll encounter a different error: "Transaction does not balance". That's
because every transaction - even your opening balance! - needs a double entry.
At the moment your opening balance transaction doesn't balance against anything
else. It's common to use an account like "Equity:Opening balances" to balance
that, and then essentially ignore that account. So your new first transaction
would look like this:
2023/06/20 * Opening Balance
Assets:Checking $400.00
Assets:Savings $1300.00
Assets:Cash $60.00
Liabilities:MasterCard $400.00
Equity:Opening balances
Now running ledger -f testing.journal bal you'll get something like this:
$1310.00 Assets
$60.00 Cash
$-50.00 Checking
$1300.00 Savings
$-2160.00 Equity:Opening balances
$450.00 Expenses
$100.00 ATM
$200.00 Automobile
$300.00 Boat
$-180.00 Bob
$30.00 Utilities:Gas
$400.00 Liabilities:MasterCard
--------------------
0
And that seems mostly accurate to me. Your checking account is $50 overdrawn
(started at $400, $650 in expenses with drawn, then a $200 refund from Bob for
a net of $450 withdrawn). Similarly, expenses from Bob net -$180, because you
paid him $20 but got $200 back.
However, you're going to run into trouble when you try to pay off that
MasterCard. Keep in mind that ledger doesn't have a concept of "assets" and
"liabilities" based on account names. It only has accounts. Transactions
consist of debits (increases to asset or expense accounts, or decreases to
liability or equity accounts) or credits (decreases to asset or expense
accounts, or increases to liability or equity accounts). The thing which
distinguishes a debit from a credit is the sign (negative or positive).
As your file is set up at the moment, it seems like debits are positive, and
credits are negative. That makes sense! Your checking account has +$400 in it
at the start; and you owe $400 on your MasterCard. But to show that you _owe_
that money, it should be marked as -$400. Hence your new opening balance
transaction might be:
2023/06/20 * Opening Balance
Assets:Checking $400.00
Assets:Savings $1300.00
Assets:Cash $60.00
Liabilities:MasterCard -$400.00
Equity:Opening balances
and then running the balance report:
$1310.00 Assets
$60.00 Cash
$-50.00 Checking
$1300.00 Savings
$-1360.00 Equity:Opening balances
$450.00 Expenses
$100.00 ATM
$200.00 Automobile
$300.00 Boat
$-180.00 Bob
$30.00 Utilities:Gas
$-400.00 Liabilities:MasterCard
--------------------
0
Now this looks totally accurate to me. Some things you can see here:
- you owe $400 to MasterCard (negative in assets/liabilities means "not your
money")
- you have $1310 in total assets (positive in assets/liabilities means "your
money")
- your net expense with Bob has been -$180, which is another way of saying
he's given you $180, because a negative expense is income
There's more about this credits/debits thing in the manual at
https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html#Stating-where-money-goes. I also find
the Plain Text Accounting Wiki at
https://github.com/plaintextaccounting/plaintextaccounting/wiki/Newcomer-FAQ to
be useful.
Hopefully this helps!
mjec
On Tue, Jun 20, 2023, at 21:50, Benjamin Compson wrote:
> I'm trying to get started with ledger, but I'm having a bit of an issue
> getting over the start line. I created a file called `testing.journal` which
> contains:
>
> 2023/06/20 * Opening Balance
> Assets:Checking $400.00
> Assets:Savings $1300.00
> Assets:Cash $60.00
> Liabilities:MasterCard $400.00
> 2023/06/16 Transfer to Bob
> Expenses:Bob $20.00
> Assets:Checking
> 2023/06/08 HarborTown Marina
> Expenses:Boat $300.00
> Assets:Checking
> 2023/06/08 7-11
> Expenses:ATM $100
> Assets:Checking
> 2023/06/08 Gas Company
> Expenses:Utilities:Gas $30.00
> Assets:Checking
> 2023/06/06 Transfer From Bob
> Expenses:Bob -$200.00
> Assets:Checking
> 2023/06/06 Insurance
> Expenses:Automobile $200.00
> Assets:Checking
>
> Now when I run ledger -f testing.journal bal, I get:
>
> $-850.00 Assets
> $60.00 Cash
> $-450.00 Checking
> $-1760.00 Checking $400.00
> $1300.00 Savings
> $450.00 Expenses
> $100.00 ATM
> $200.00 Automobile
> $300.00 Boat
> $-180.00 Bob
> $30.00 Utilities:Gas
> $400.00 Liabilities:MasterCard
> --------------------
> 0
>
> Which just doesn't seem right. Like the negative amounts seem backwards and I
> don't understand why there is a *Checking* *and* a *Checking $400.00* line?
>
> I used a starting balance from today, but then post-dated transactions. Maybe
> that's bad form. I'm sorry if this is too basic, but I swear I've been
> reading through the documentation. Also, I'm very not used to html email, so
> if this formatting is screwed up, I apologize.
>
>
>
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