On Thu, Apr 13, 2017 at 6:14 PM, Oon-Ee Ng <ngoonee.t...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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). > I don't see a problem using it against an Expenses account. You can certainly do that. There's no guidance on this... this type of semi-automated padding is a Beancount feature for your convenience. -- 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/CAK21%2BhMob0tn%3DrNgjnu_yRANMAM5g-7CFw1StFsx%2BdXi-9c3gg%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
