Preamble: I'm a former Gnucash user, and my pre-2017 accounts were imported from there, now using beancount with fava as a complete replacement.
Historically, I have an account called Expenses:UnaccountedExpenses which is the balancing account for things that go missing. I have two Cash accounts (Assets:Cash:Me and Assets:Cash:Wife) and we use fava to input our cash transactions on the go. Of course, over the course of a week or two sometimes we'll miss a transaction, maybe forget to record cash paid for lunch, maybe we dropped some coins on the floor, whatever it is. The amounts are small, and so I just created this UnaccountedExpenses account to track those amounts. Additionally this account has been used to track unknown flows of money (I've had cheques and transfers appear in my bank account before which I have no record of. Perhaps payment for some service I've rendered but forgot about). This seems to be what Pad and Balance are made for, in beancount. However the documentation recommends (highly?) an equity account, which makes sense for the example given of opening balances etc. My question is - should my 'unaccounted transactions' be considered an equity transfer or an expense? My previous reason for listing this as an expense is that the cashflow tracked here is almost always actually a (forgotten) expense, and should thus show up as something I've spent. I'd like to hear some accounting reasoning on that (I understand equity to mean 'value', but I'm an engineer not an accountant). Thanks! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Beancount" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to beancount+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to beancount@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/CAGQ70evECknKxELjW7PmPhBVeDidpMw9ZQ4P-e6%2BBQxNhR8OzA%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
