On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 7:25 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Hey, > > Sorry all for the very slow response. The holiday period got the better of > me. > > All of these methods you've mentioned seem to only count half the cost on > your own accounts though and the other half is counted against a generic > account for your partner or roommate? What I would like to do is to count > the full amount of our shared apartment expenses against a shared account > and then possibly balance this shared account with payments from each of > us. The reason I'm interested in doing it this way is that I'd like to get > a clear picture of the actual cost of our living arrangement so that we can > evaluate it against other apartments for example. If we always did split > everything in half then I could use the way you described and just multiply > either share by 2 and I'd got the full cost but the parts we pay vary quite > regularly. >
Yes, this is interesting, and I've done this in the past for a common project with someone else. Essentially, I would record the transactions twice: once for my half in my own personal ledger, and once again with the full amount in a separate, shared ledger. There was also some shared account to update. For the shared account I ended up splitting the income legs manually, and copy-pasting + editing to replicate to my personal account. That's not the best, it was too much manual work and it was annoying (but it worked). However, that being said, I'm currently gearing up for doing this once again and better this time around, especially since I'll have a lot less time to do this type of stuff. We just gave birth to a baby boy, and call me neurotic, but I'm planning to track all his related expenses separately to do just what you described. In other words, on my personal ledger, all expenses for my kid should appear to a single Expenses account to his name. For instance, my "Food" total should account for just the food I consume, not that which he does. His expenses should appear on my income statement as an outflow of general costs related to his maintenance, or perhaps just a few high-level accounts. This is more accurate as Mom will inevitably end up paying for different types of thing than Dad will. On the shared ledger, those same expenses will appear to their respective categories (e.g. "Food" will be his food this time around, and just his) and that should give a full picture of his costs, paid for by Mom and Dad, which is more interesting that just the parts which I happened to have paid for. I think this is similar to what you need to do. Here's how I'm planning to implement this, this time around: - I want to stop recording transactions twice, as it required some annoying manual synchronization and editing. Instead, in my personal ledger, I will record expenses for my kid to categories as if they were my own, but tag transactions with a special and very short tag (there will be many). A plugin will convert the expenses accounts of those transactions to a single generic account to his name, as described above. - I'll write a script that will pull out these transactions from my ledger and instead of transforming the Expenses account this time, it will transform the other (assets or liabilities accounts) postings to a generic "inflow" contribution account from his father. That will output some other file in Beancount format. - Similarly, I'll also write another script that will pull information from a spreadsheet for his mother's expenses related to him. She doesn't maintain her own Beancount file - alas! - but can hopefully put her expenses for him on a spreadsheet, manually. That script will convert this Google spreadsheet to a Beancount file for his Mom's contributions, booked against a similar inflow-from-Mom account. - Finally, I'll create some top-level Beancount file that will contain common definitions and such and which will include the two dad.beancount and mom.beancount file. That should form his dataset with his own report. I made a little diagram to show this flow more clearly: https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/18fTrrGlmz0jFbfcGGHTffbdRwbmST8r9_3O26Dd1Xww/edit?usp=sharing Now, one remaining question regards whether those conversion scripts ought to always reconvert the entire set of transactions. I think the answer to that is: no. For instance, once imported, spreadsheet lines which have been accounted for in the mom.beancount file can be safely ignored. Mom can delete the spreadsheet contents once the transactions have been included. That's a choice, however, it doesn't have to be that way, but if it didn't, I suspect the spreadsheet would grow very large. Also, not reimporting and doing some sort of fuzzy matching between the spreadsheet or personal.beancount file contents to identify those transactions which have already been imported would allow me to do minor manual edits to the imported transactions, such as adding comments or tags, or perhaps the occasional refinements to categorization. Now someone more pedantic might choose to set this up such that the "pristine" source of transaction is always the upstream personal.beancount ledger and the Mom spreadsheet, and that those files be always recreated entirely from scratch. That's also a valid design, it just sets a higher level of dedication over time to those pristine sources. Hopefully, if time allows - between moments patting the kid to sleep and feeding him bottles and responding to his cute noises and trying to guess the particular origins of his numerous and often unexplained dramatic wailing moments - you should eventually see some of these scripts appear under beancount/experiments/ Cheers, > Andreas > > > On Sunday, December 24, 2017 at 1:57:54 PM UTC, Dominik Aumayr wrote: >> >> To give another example: My partner uses Beancount and Fava ( >> https://beancount.github.io/fava/) as well, and we both have a >> Liabilities-account for each other. So if I buy something that belongs to >> her but I pay, I create an according transaction (eg. Assets:CreditCard and >> Liabilities:Partner), and she does the same in the opposite direction. For >> expenses that are split between us half of it goes to my Expenses account, >> and half to her Liabilities account (eg. Assets:CreditCard, Expenses:Rent >> and Liabilities:Partner). >> >> At the end of each month we both compare the balance of her >> Liabilites-account in my journal, and mine in her's, and make a balancing >> (real) transaction accordingly. >> >> After we do that, I wrote an exporter/importer for Fava that >> (a) is used to export a report from my Journal with her >> Liabilities-account and it's transactions in the last month, and >> (b) is used to import this file with transactions (beancount-format!) >> into her journal (via a Fava importer). >> (c) vice-versa for her >> >> This way, we both have all the transactions concerting both of us in each >> of our journals, and a way to correct them if something is not clear/wrong. >> Sounds like a little bit of work, but configured the right way (talking >> about the importer) and this is a 2-minute task each month. >> >> Best, >> Dominik >> >> >> > Am 24.12.2017 um 07:03 schrieb Martin Blais <[email protected]>: >> > >> > I do this too - my partner and I share most expenses - and the simple >> way is to create for your girlfriend an assets account (if she generally >> pays after the fact) or a liabilities account (if she generally pays ahead >> of time), and then to use the SQL client to generate a journal of that >> account to list all that was posted and compute the current balance (ours >> gets uploaded to a Google Sheets doc where she can review it for errors or >> unexpected items). When your girlfriend/roommate makes transfers to pay for >> those shared expenses incurred on your side, you post the payment against >> that account. It's really convenient to have that account as you can use it >> for any other purpose, e.g., transfers, gifts, etc. "I'll just put it on >> your account," you can say. It's purely an electronic transaction between >> the two of you; the actual reconciliation is a separate concern. >> > >> > The other side of this coin is a bit more complicated though. I'm >> referring to the expenses which she pays for and which you do have to >> transfer to her. You can use the same account, but you need to find a way >> for her to communicate those expenses to you, so you can reduce the account >> accordingly. We use a Google Sheets document that she updates, and I simply >> update my corresponding transactions from that doc (I haven't automated >> getting all the details from it yet to create transactions, but it's >> doable). One challenge, you may find, is that your partner forgets to >> update the doc (and therefore doesn't always get the corresponding >> reimbursement). That's an ongoing issue; I have no solution for it other >> than to remind. >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 9:27 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: >> > Hey, >> > >> > I'm trying to figure out a good simple strategy that allows me to track >> expenses that I share with my girlfriend. We live together and we have two >> types of shared expenses: the ones for our apartment like rent and >> utilities and the ones where usually I pay for something for the both of >> us. >> > >> > For the first type of transactions I don't care about the balance >> between us, she pays a fixed amount into my account from which most bills >> go out from each month. I do however care about having accurate tracking of >> these expenses so I can tell what our fixed monthly expenses are. For >> example, I want the full rent and cost of all the utilities to show up >> among my expenses. At the moment I'm tracking this using regular expense >> accounts which I create posts against whenever I pay our rent for example. >> I post the transactions where my girlfriend sends me the fixed amount as a >> special income account and I'm pretty happy with this solution (I think). >> > >> > I currently have no solution that I'm happy with for the second type of >> transactions. These transactions usually occur at an irregular basis and >> the amounts vary wildly and I always care about maintaining some sort of >> balance but whether I care about tracking the full value to an expense >> account or not varies. For example, if I pay for a pair of shoes she wants >> because she doesn't have any money in the currency then I'd want to keep >> track of the balance she owes me but not the expense. However if we go and >> buy Christmas decorations and I pay then I'd want to record the full amount >> to an expense account and half of the amount to an account that represents >> the money my girlfriend owes me. Preferably I'd like to track the balance >> between me and my girlfriend as an asset account as that to me seems like >> the quickest way to at a glance tell the status between us (but I may be >> wrong). >> > >> > I was playing around with using an intermediate liability account (see >> bellow) and I think I could calculate the balance between us with a query >> but since we already have a history and I just started using beancount I >> have no account to post the current balance against and future payments to >> balance this would be harder to track without an asset account? >> > >> > 2017-11-26 * "Christmas" >> > Expenses:Home:Decoration 30 GBP >> > Liabilities:Shared -30 GBP >> > >> > 2017-11-26 * "Christmas" >> > Liabilities:Shared 30 GBP >> > Liabilities:Amex -30 GBP >> > >> > Does anyone have any idea on how to track this in a neat way, >> preferably without plugins. And yes I've read the expense sharing cookbok >> but didn't see any solution I was perfectly happy with :). >> > >> > Cheers! >> > Andreas >> > >> > -- >> > 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 [email protected]. >> > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >> > To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/ms >> gid/beancount/4b167c55-e651-4d93-a2a1-cebd41813a59%40googlegroups.com. >> > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >> > >> > >> > -- >> > 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 [email protected]. >> > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >> > To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/ms >> gid/beancount/CAK21%2BhP3DgZOr62enBFA%2ByyW68bdGYHMh%3Dpfqfg >> Khc5WHF9VZA%40mail.gmail.com. >> > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >> >> -- > 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 [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/ > msgid/beancount/c228fb07-b004-47d2-a294-5d411e7fbb6b%40googlegroups.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/c228fb07-b004-47d2-a294-5d411e7fbb6b%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Beancount" group. 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