On Sun, Apr 29, 2018 at 3:41 AM, Martin Michlmayr <t...@cyrius.com> wrote:
> * mplo...@gmail.com <mplo...@gmail.com> [2018-04-28 16:43]: > > Martin, could you explain a little bit on the logic on making > > decision on keeping record as "narration" vs "payee" "" ? > > > > What are the advantages / disadvantages. Let say for example if i > > put all my records as narrations, what is the situation in which i > > might see the disadvantages to this strategy? > > > > Sorry for this detailed questions, i am just trying to understand. > > Beancount have 2 description fields VS 1 in ledger, so there should > > be the reason why you added additional field. > > I'm not Martin Blais, but coming from ledger I'm really glad that > beancount has the distinction of payee and narration. > > Payee is who I'm dealing with. Narration is a description of what the > transaction is about. Some people don't use a description but I think > it's important because it allows you to remember what the transaction > was about. > > Sure, for your SimpleMobile payment it's pretty simple. You know it's > always going to be a "monthly phone plan" or something like that. > > But what does "Amazon Marketplace" mean? Was it a purchase of food? > Was it the bike you bought? The gloves? What does "Amazon > Marketplace" really tell you apart from who the vendor is (in fact, > with Amazon Marketplace you don't even record who the actual vendor > is, just that you bought it via Amazon)? That's where the narration > comes in. Now you can say this is what account names are for, but if > you use Expenses:Clothes you may still want to know which purchase was > the t-shirt you like so much vs the gloves vs the socks, etc. > Actually it would be interesting when extracting entries for importing to combine credit card entries with Amazon's Order History Report (a download of your past orders), or even to make a script that will separately incorporate information from the Amazon Order History Report in an existing Beancount file. I always manually try to identify each extract entry with a description from my Amazon page, but I do this manually, and it's annoying. > > The payee is useful because it lets you group things and search for > them. e.g. "Show me all purchases from Amazon Marketplace." > > -- > Martin Michlmayr > http://www.cyrius.com/ > > -- > 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/20180429074105.x7alrcndzeybeblo%40jirafa.cyrius.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 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%2BhM4Fn4ifKnDg3ufTK10vwFvOxo1prB%3DAUzm-Db%2Bo%2BqEXg%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
