Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting

Re:Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting by gglitch on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @11:17AM (#17247813)

Thanks for this outline. I've been a happy user of Ledger for several months now, but have been stymied about how to model a scenario in which several family members pay me in advance for a bill we collectively owe that's payable in the future, and in which their payments end up in my checking account. I now see that I should have set up the future sum payment as a local, temporary liability, each family member's deposit payments to me as a local, temporary asset other than my checking account (making my local checking balance diverge from that reported by my bank -- but to my benefit!), then the future sum payment as a transfer from the local temporary asset to the local temporary liability, and bringing all accounts to their correct balances and realigning them with my bank.

So, again, thanks a lot for that last line, which helped me out.

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Re:Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting by Jtsummers on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @11:41AM (#17248026)

I'd want to keep my checking account in ledger and real world matching. So either use a virtual account to indicate that some money, while existing in checking, is actually allocated to something else (this is a budget, basically). You can also create asset accounts for what people owe you. Once they pay you you move it from what they owe you to your checking account. For this one, you might have a couple transactions like:

  2018/06/01 Roommate owes me
      Assets:Accounts Receivable       100.00 USD
      Income:Roommate
  2018/06/06 Roommate paid me
      Assets:Checking                  100.00 USD
      Assets:Accounts Receivable

You can drill down another level to add who owes you the money, or perhaps tag it.

The end result is that your checking account is always accurate. Then, as maxerickson says, use virtual accounts to handle mark where the needs to go next or what it's intended for. Also examine ledger's budgeting capabilities for this.

https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Effective-Da...

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Re:Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting by gglitch on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @12:25PM (#17248452)

Thanks for the detailed recommendations! I've read the documentation on virtual accounts but haven't wrapped my mind around them yet. I'll have another go at it.

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Re:Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting by maxerickson on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @11:26AM (#17247883)

You could use virtual accounts for that, posting the received funds to your checking account and also to a virtual account that you eventually balance with the purchase (which would also have both real and virtual postings).

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Re:Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting by smichael on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @12:54PM (#17248785)

It's easy to confuse "virtual accounts" (imaginary accounts or subaccounts) with "virtual postings" (unbalanced postings), but remember these are different things with different uses. You can post to either kind of account with either kind of posting.

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Re:Show HN: Transity – Plain Text Accounting by gglitch on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @12:17PM (#17248365)

Thanks. I've had a hard time understanding the documentation on virtual accounts, but I'll have another look at it.

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