> > 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). >
My reasoning is to use the most specific account you can, where „Equity“ is the least specific and therefore less specific than „Expenses“. E.g. - if you know you spent $1 in food, specifically cookies, you could use Expenses:Food:Cookies - if you know you spent $1 in food but don't need to specify what exactly, use Expenses:Food:Various - if you know you spent $1 but don't need to say (or remember) in what, use Expenses:Unaccounted (or call it Expenses:Various) - if you know there was a $1 transaction but you don't even know if it was an Expense or an Assets transfer or a Liability etc., use Equity:Unaccounted Also, to each of the previous cases, add this subcase: „if you don't know the amount or the number of transactions, you should use 'pad' with that account instead of writing the amounts (like $1)“. That is, you could pad to Expenses:Food:Cookies, to Expenses:Food:Various, Expenses:Unaccounted, Equity:Unaccounted. Other accounts (Income, …) also make sense: for instance, I have a bank account that pays around 0'02€ every month in interest, and I won't spend time recording every transaction; instead I pad to Income:Bank1:Interest, maybe once a year, to express that „this account paid me some interest but I don't care about the number of transactions or the amount of each transaction“. In practice, I rarely use Expenses:Unaccounted (== „I spent something but don't know what“) because it rarely happens that I know nothing else about the transactions; instead I'll say the type (e.g. Expenses:Food:Various) or just use Equity:Unaccounted for all cases (== „there were some movements, but I don't know or I don't care about which ones or even about +/-“). Equity:Unaccounted always with pad (never write Equity:* transactions by hand unless you understand very well everything else, and be prepared to rectify them if you do, because it makes little). I sometimes use „Expenses:Food:Various“ with pad. And of course „Expenses:Food:Cookies“ never with pad, always with detailed information. I remember this topic was very difficult for me to understand, because you have the freedom to use accounts as you like and you need to create your own rules as you understand more and more. My rules and algorithms are the ones stated above, and I don't know if they're accounting-ly correct, but they now make sense to me. Greetings -- 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/877f2nw254.wl-n142857%40gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
