On Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 2:13 PM, Stefano Zacchiroli <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 12:59:04PM -0500, Martin Blais wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 12:50 PM, Simon Michael <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> > > Congrats, Martin!!
>
> Ditto!
>
> > > Gonna present him with his ledger on his 18th birthday ? (Yikes :-)
>
> So, *cough* I'm actually doing the same think for my kid *cough*, with a
> tag for each transaction that is related to him.
>
> (Digression: the fact that you need the tag to be short looks like due
> to the current Beancount limitation of having to put tags on the same
> line of payee/description, which can get pretty long. I'm still doing
> this in Ledger-CLI --- and generating a beancount automatically from it
> for Fava and SQL-ish queries --- where tags can be on subsequent
> (comment) lines so the tag can get long-ish, without being too much of a
> hassle.)
>

I could do this using metadata (and change the scripts), same same.
In fact, I could put the metadata on the postings instead of the
transaction, which would be more flexible.


But I'm not exactly sure to understand what's the benefit of Martin
> rewriting plugin --- aside from showing off the beautiful data
> model/flow that Beancount offers and which I love, that is :-)). Even
> with just a simple tag, I can filter all transactions with a simple
> query, and get a current balance (or filtered ledger, or whatever),
> where the categories are the "right" ones, in the sense that grocery
> would be (baby-related) Expenses:Grocery, clothes Expenses:Clothes, etc.
>

My goals are different. On my personal ledger I don't want to see my son's
expenses categories. It wouldn't make much sense because my mix of payments
differs from the total costs associated with his maintenance. Say, for
example, that I tend to pay for all the nanny stuff and the mother pays for
all the food stuff. I would see a lot of nanny stuff on my balance sheet,
and no food expenses. The reality is that I pay for a good portion of
everything, and my son's ledger will more accurately reflect that
breakdown, and my costs are some fraction of that. So I choose not to track
this on my personal one, and I replace all these expenses by a single
account.

Another way of doing what you do (and FWIW that's what I was going to do
originally), is to create a plugin that inserts a root for your kid in the
account name. For example, Expenses:Grocery could become
Expenses:Kid:Grocery, and so on. This way your balance sheet doesn't blend
your Grocery and your kid's.


What am I missing here?
>

Let me provide a full example, and this should serve to clarify for others
as well.

In my personal Beancount ledger, I import a transaction like this:

  2018-01-26 * "CVS" "Pampers size 1"
    Liabilities:CreditCard           -30.17 USD

I categorize it manually as I currently do, and while doing that, I also
notice it's for my kid. I insert a tag, so this is what I write:

  2018-01-26 * "CVS" "Pampers size 1" #kid
    Liabilities:CreditCard           -30.17 USD
    Expenses:Pharmacy

Note here that my categorization books to the same set of account which I
use for myself. That "Pharmacy" account is the same as mine, but it won't
show up there.
The beancount.plugins.divert_expenses plugin renames that to this
automatically:

  2018-01-26 * "CVS" "Pampers size 1" #kid
    Liabilities:CreditCard           -30.17 USD
    Expenses:Kid

Now, when I filter and extract his transactions from my personal ledger
using the extract_beancount script, I have to disable the plugin (I just
realized this bit is missing, will code it right away) when I read it, and
instead change the inflow account, so it becomes this:

  2018-01-26 * "CVS" "Pampers size 1" #kid
    Income:Dad           -30.17 USD
    Expenses:Pharmacy

Furthermore, the Google Sheets script which imports the mother's expenses
produces something like this:

  2018-01-26 * "Union Mkt" "Baby food" #kid
    Income:Mom           -15.36 USD
    Expenses:Grocery

And his ledger includes both of these files.
There are no assets (yet), and two income accounts.
Optionally, I could attempt to maintain the particular source of the
payments on his side (e.g. Income:Dad:CreditCard1).

I hope this helps,




>
> Cheers.
> --
> Stefano Zacchiroli . [email protected] . upsilon.cc/zack . . o . . . o . o
> Computer Science Professor . CTO Software Heritage . . . . . o . . . o o
> Former Debian Project Leader & OSI Board Director  . . . o o o . . . o .
> « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
>
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