tags_pending plugin corner case

[john.a.r...@gmail.com]

I find the tags_pending plugin very helpful. It's generally quite reliable but there have been several instances in which liknked transactions were not appropriately tagged as PENDING.

I now believe this occurs when it happens that every transaction linked with the same link includes the same two posting accounts. In such cases, the postings will always sum to zero. I see in the code comments that a single transaction with the link is always marked as PENDING, and I assume this is to make sure the initial entry in the series is marked as pending even though it totals to zero.

I'm not a programmer . Does this diagnosis make sense? And is there a way to make the plugin work in this corner case?

Thanks.

[Martin Blais]

Can you share a minimal example input that will trigger this case?

Thank you,

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[John Rakestraw]

On 2022-02-19 Sat, Martin Blais wrote:
> Can you share a minimal example input that will trigger this case?
> Thank you,
>

Sure.

Assume this ledger:

;;===
plugin "beancount.plugins.tag_pending"

2022-01-01 open Assets:Reimbursable
2022-01-01 open Liabilities:CredCard1
2022-01-01 open Liabilities:CredCard2

2022-02-19 txn "A reimbursable expense" "" ^2022feb
Assets:Reimbursable 50.00 USD
Liabilities:CredCard1

2022-02-19 txn "Another reimbursable expense" "" ^2022feb
Assets:Reimbursable 35.00 USD
Liabilities:CredCard1

;; 2022-02-19 txn "Another reimbursable expense" "charged to different card" ^2022feb
;; Assets:Reimbursable 30.00 USD
;; Liabilities:CredCard2
;;===


And run this query:

bean-query ledger.beancount "SELECT date,description,position WHERE
account ~ 'reimbursable' and 'PENDING' IN tags"

If you run it with the third transaction (charged to a different credit
card) commented, then the report is empty. If you run it with the third
transaction uncommented, then the report has the appropriate response.

I know that folks are focussed on beancount 3 these days and that you
might not want to spend time on this, so I should say that shortly after
sending my previous message I realized that I can make this work by
including an entry like the following each month:

2022-02-01 txn "Placeholder entry" "" ^2022feb
Assets:Reimbursable 0.00 USD
Liabilities:CredCard3

(It doesn't matter which credit card I use here, as long as it's
different from the one used in the other transactions.)

Hope this clarifies.

John

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[Martin Blais]

So I think the real problem here is that this plugin code was an example IIRC put together quickly in order to answer a question on a mailing-list a long time ago. The heuristic it's using to identify the subset of accounts that are to be checked for pending balance across linked transactions isn't great. You could change the code to use metadata on the Open directory to identify which accounts whose linked transactions should be checked in that way instead of using the heuristic - which would be a more explicit and sensible approach. I think the approach could be changed. (BTW the whole thing is 27 lines of code. See https://github.com/beancount/beancount/blob/v2/beancount/plugins/tag_pending.py#L53)