Storing related documents together

[Andrzej]

I want to make my past tax returns visible to beancount via document directive. My problem is that I like to store all documents relevant to taxation year in one directory. I'm wondering if someone already had similar issue?

I'm fine with implementing it myself, I just have no idea what is right abstraction here.

Problem statement

My current structure looks like this:

documents/Expenses/Taxes$ find

2016/taxform1.pdf

2016/taxform2.pdf

2016/signed.jpg

2017/taxform3.pdf

2017/signed.jpg

2017/calculations.xlsx

2017/notes.txt

Each tax year has 3-10 files inside (structure differs year by year)

I would like to add all contents of a directory as a document, something along the lines:

2017-04-10 document Expenses:Taxes "documents/Expenses/Taxes/2016"

2018-04-05 document Expenses:Taxes "documents/Expenses/Taxes/2017"

It's fine to change directory name to some other name (such as 2017-04-10.filing/)

I'd like to keep filenames without dates to make manual navigation easier (I do read those files later).

Possible solutions

0. Support directory documents - right now I can see that no one expected this, it chokes fava :)

1. Add tar files for each such directory

Issues:

- it makes files harder to find something in those files

- Reading them requires extra step

2. Just add all files manually:

2017-04-10 document Expenses:Taxes "documents/Expenses/Taxes/2016/taxform1.pdf"

2017-04-10 document Expenses:Taxes "documents/Expenses/Taxes/2016/taxform2.pdf"

2017-04-10 document Expenses:Taxes "documents/Expenses/Taxes/2016/signed.jpg"

...

Issues

a: I may forget to add some files (for example ones created later)

b: Quite verbose, it requires me to list all files (probably fine, there are not so many of them)

2a. Write plugin to check that all files in a directory structure are added as documents.

It only leaves issue b (which is not big deal)

3. Write plugin that navigates the path

PATH/TO/ACCOUNT/<DATE>.<TAG>/file

and creates document entry for each file, it could use directory naming scheme like "2017-04-10.tax_16" to know the date. Then file path would look like this:

  documents/Expenses/Taxes/2017-04-10.tax_16/taxform1.pdf

and plugin would generate entry like so:

  2017-04-10 Expenses:Taxes "documents/Expenses/Taxes/2017-04-10.tax_16/taxform1.pdf" #tax_16

[Martin Blais]

I think the most straightforward way to handle this is to write your own plugin that adds the relevant directives.

Should be very simple to do.

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