Resetting cash assets (recommendations welcome)

[Mattijs Hoitink]

Hi,

In my ledger I have an asset account for cash set up, used for when I withdraw from an ATM machine for example. However I do not keep track of what I spent that money on exactly, I just assume that when it enters the account (my wallet) it is spent (from a ledger perspective).

I'm not interested in keeping track of what I spent it on (I might give some to my wife etc) so I'm looking for ways to reset the asset account to empty, otherwise it keeps accumulating. Does anyone have any recommendations for doing this, or a particular process?

Any ideas are welcome!

cheers,
mattijs

[Metin Akat]

Hi,

I am not sure why exactly would you want to do that, but if I get it right, you should just rename it from `Assets:CashWallet` to `Expenses:CashWallet`. It will continue to work as before (will accumulate value), but it will be "OK" (all expense accounts work like that) as it won't show up as "money you have".

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[Zhuoyun Wei]

Hi,

I would recommend this:

1. Make a transfer from Assets:Bank to Assets:Cash every time you
withdraw from ATM;
2. Count your money in you wallet from time to time (say, monthly) and
use "balance" directive to assert how many money in your wallet;
3. Insert a "pad" directive one day before the "balance" directive to
automatically generate a transfer from your wallet to your designated
account (e.g. Expenses:RandomStuff) to make the next balance assertion
pass.

I use the similar procedure for a bank investment account which accrues
interest every day. But I don't want to duplicate every interest income
in that account because there are no script-friendly way to export data
from that bank. So I just assert the balance monthly and pad the
difference to "Income:Interest" or something like that.


2018-04-02 21:26:12 Mattijs Hoitink <mattijs...@gmail.com>:

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[Metin Akat]

Yes, IMO this is a much better workflow, as it actually allows you to track something at all :). Otherwise, why do we bother do do our own, personal accounting.

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[Mattijs Hoitink]

Thank you for this suggestion, it makes total sense and works perfectly for my situation.

[Mattijs Hoitink]

Otherwise, why do we bother do do our own, personal accounting.

That's a very broad statement. I do 99% of my transactions using bank or credit cards so that is the reason I'm interested in personal accounting. I'm interested in the money leaving my bank and entering my wallet but not really what it is spent on after that since it's such small amounts in the overall picture. Some months I don't even use cash at all. It's also very time consuming to track the cash and what it is spent on, especially if it is handed to other family members and there are no receipts. So a general estimate of when it is used and how much is left is perfect, like Zhuoyun Wei suggested.

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[Martin Blais]

That's exactly what I do and would recommend.

(Personally I try to track only non-food receipts, so I book the "disappeared" cash to food.)

In practice I'm too lazy to insert the cash balance regularly, so I'd like to eventually create a plugin that distributes it evenly over time (say, each Friday).

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