Re: Ledger reports for future planning and "how am I doing?"
Simon, Martin, Just a quick catch up on this -- one of my latest approaches to help with this challenge is to look at notes attached to transactions that end in :m, and then generate depreciating entries from that. Example: 2016/01/05 Insurance ; Auto:12m Expense:Auto:Insurance £600.00 Assets:Current:Chequing Will generate a first-month offset transaction: 2016/01/05 Insurance Depreciation ; :Deprec: Assets:Deprec:Auto:Insurance £550.00 Expense:Auto:Insurance Then for the next 11 months..: 2016/02/01 Insurance Depreciation ; :Deprec: Expense:Auto:Insurance £50 Assets:Deprec:Auto:Insurance I'm considering also using this for holidays, for example. This way I can look at my monthly holiday expenses smoothed out. And I can filter out the Deprec tag if I want the cash expenses. Mark On Monday, 17 August 2015 23:27:04 UTC+1, Simon Michael (sm) wrote: > > On 8/16/15 2:33 PM, Mark Scannell wrote: > > Some challenges and reasons to move beyond this: > > - Income can be occasional, monthly, more secure or less secure (eg > bonus, > > shares). This is becoming more significant for me. > > - Long term savings can be locked-in pension, cash, or various forms of > > long term investments that are sellable (eg buy-to-let, ISA accounts) > > - Expenses can be optional. Some things can be dropped without > significant > > impact. (Holidays, renovations) > > - Expenses aren't regular. Some are prepaid for a year (eg insurance), > some > > are prepaid for a few years (eg car). > > - Expenses can be time-bound. Specifically, large childcare expenses > aren't > > forever. Or lost-income due to unpaid maternity time. > > These seem to point towards refining your chart of accounts - > adding/reorganizing categories to bring out more of the details you're > interested in. Eg once expenses are categorized as fixed/optional, you > can more easily play what-if by filtering out the optional. > > > Some reports I'd love to get: > > - See how I'm trending. How would my change of net worth be in 12 months > if > > I continue on the same course? > > - See how things could change. What if I earned more? Earned less? Took > on > > more expensive childcare? > > - How is my liquidity position? If I were to take on a longer-term > > investment, or leverage myself up, how easily could I cover my > > debts/de-leverage? > > - How is my liquidity position trending? > > These seem (mostly ?) about projecting into the future. Two approaches > to consider: in one, you use Ledger's automatic transactions to generate > recurring transactions arbitrarily far into the future. In the other, > you generate the journal entries yourself (eg with editor macros) and > just save them in a file, eg future.ledger, which also includes your > current ledger. The first approach will require expertise if you want to > model one-off and irregular future transactions. The second seems more > tedious, but not if you're expert with your editor, and it's simple and > gives full control. And of course you could combine both. > > I currently use the second approach and just run reports in the usual > way. For what-ifs I may use temporary account aliases or extra included > files. For quick balance-over-time charts, I use hledger-web, or for > something more complex I would export report data as CSV to a > spreadsheet and do the charting there. > > > -- --- 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 ledger-cli+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Ledger reports for future planning and how am I doing?
On 8/16/15 2:33 PM, Mark Scannell wrote: Some challenges and reasons to move beyond this: - Income can be occasional, monthly, more secure or less secure (eg bonus, shares). This is becoming more significant for me. - Long term savings can be locked-in pension, cash, or various forms of long term investments that are sellable (eg buy-to-let, ISA accounts) - Expenses can be optional. Some things can be dropped without significant impact. (Holidays, renovations) - Expenses aren't regular. Some are prepaid for a year (eg insurance), some are prepaid for a few years (eg car). - Expenses can be time-bound. Specifically, large childcare expenses aren't forever. Or lost-income due to unpaid maternity time. These seem to point towards refining your chart of accounts - adding/reorganizing categories to bring out more of the details you're interested in. Eg once expenses are categorized as fixed/optional, you can more easily play what-if by filtering out the optional. Some reports I'd love to get: - See how I'm trending. How would my change of net worth be in 12 months if I continue on the same course? - See how things could change. What if I earned more? Earned less? Took on more expensive childcare? - How is my liquidity position? If I were to take on a longer-term investment, or leverage myself up, how easily could I cover my debts/de-leverage? - How is my liquidity position trending? These seem (mostly ?) about projecting into the future. Two approaches to consider: in one, you use Ledger's automatic transactions to generate recurring transactions arbitrarily far into the future. In the other, you generate the journal entries yourself (eg with editor macros) and just save them in a file, eg future.ledger, which also includes your current ledger. The first approach will require expertise if you want to model one-off and irregular future transactions. The second seems more tedious, but not if you're expert with your editor, and it's simple and gives full control. And of course you could combine both. I currently use the second approach and just run reports in the usual way. For what-ifs I may use temporary account aliases or extra included files. For quick balance-over-time charts, I use hledger-web, or for something more complex I would export report data as CSV to a spreadsheet and do the charting there. -- --- 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 ledger-cli+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Ledger reports for future planning and how am I doing?
Hello everyone! So I've been keeping personal books, and now joint, for more than five years. It's pretty comprehensive at this point. First gnucash and then converted over to ledger. I've always had a very good intuitive sense of how I'm doing based on regular incomings being greater than outgoings, and I want to really move beyond this -- it really seems that no matter what reports I put together, I fundamentally revert back to this intuition as a gut-check. Some challenges and reasons to move beyond this: - Income can be occasional, monthly, more secure or less secure (eg bonus, shares). This is becoming more significant for me. - Long term savings can be locked-in pension, cash, or various forms of long term investments that are sellable (eg buy-to-let, ISA accounts) - Expenses can be optional. Some things can be dropped without significant impact. (Holidays, renovations) - Expenses aren't regular. Some are prepaid for a year (eg insurance), some are prepaid for a few years (eg car). - Expenses can be time-bound. Specifically, large childcare expenses aren't forever. Or lost-income due to unpaid maternity time. Some reports I'd love to get: - See how I'm trending. How would my change of net worth be in 12 months if I continue on the same course? - See how things could change. What if I earned more? Earned less? Took on more expensive childcare? - How is my liquidity position? If I were to take on a longer-term investment, or leverage myself up, how easily could I cover my debts/de-leverage? - How is my liquidity position trending? Does anyone have any good approach to this? I've written both python and nodejs wrappers on top of ledger to generate my own reports, so this is more of a question of how to best make use of double-entry accounting. I really just want to have a superior gut-check. Thanks! Mark -- --- 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 ledger-cli+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Ledger reports for future planning and how am I doing?
On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 5:33 PM, Mark Scannell mesca...@gmail.com wrote: Hello everyone! So I've been keeping personal books, and now joint, for more than five years. It's pretty comprehensive at this point. First gnucash and then converted over to ledger. I've always had a very good intuitive sense of how I'm doing based on regular incomings being greater than outgoings, and I want to really move beyond this -- it really seems that no matter what reports I put together, I fundamentally revert back to this intuition as a gut-check. Some challenges and reasons to move beyond this: - Income can be occasional, monthly, more secure or less secure (eg bonus, shares). This is becoming more significant for me. - Long term savings can be locked-in pension, cash, or various forms of long term investments that are sellable (eg buy-to-let, ISA accounts) - Expenses can be optional. Some things can be dropped without significant impact. (Holidays, renovations) - Expenses aren't regular. Some are prepaid for a year (eg insurance), some are prepaid for a few years (eg car). - Expenses can be time-bound. Specifically, large childcare expenses aren't forever. Or lost-income due to unpaid maternity time. Some reports I'd love to get: - See how I'm trending. How would my change of net worth be in 12 months if I continue on the same course? I'm doing this here, plotting it over time, fitting a line over the last four months and extending into the future for fun: https://bitbucket.org/blais/beancount/src/014384bd90091e48ebc5b1f3d2dc48bd8639103d/experiments/net-worth-over-time.py?at=default -- --- 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 ledger-cli+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
