Hello,
For someone who uses Beancount to keep the books of a small company, I was wondering what is the correct convention for declaring dividends?
After reading about this in general accounting documents, it seems like in Beancount one should add to the Equity:Earnings:Previous account, and subtract from a Liabilities:Dividends-Payable account.
However, in Beancount the Equity:Earnings:Previous account is a sort of "virtual" account which is usually not opened in the journal, whose balance is auto-generated. If I do open that account so that I'm able to write transactions to it, its balance is always visible in Fava's balance sheet, which I'm not sure, but it looks a bit odd.
And if I use a different equity account, eg. Equity:Dividends, then the Equity:Earnings:Previous balance doesn't get calculated correctly, ie. it looks as though the company has a delicious balance of previous earnings when it has actually declared them as dividends.
Thanks,
Aragon