Beancount Balance Assertion for Sum of accounts

[David Karapetyan]

Hello,

Firstly, I wanted to compliment you on this brilliant project (and your excellent documentation in particular on double-entry accounting, useful particularly for people already working in technical fields). I had a question about balance assertions for investment accounts. Specifically, suppose I have the following two (and only two transactions) for Fidelity:

Assets:US:Fidelity:SPAXX   10 USD

Assets:US:Fidelity:FNILX 20 USD

I would like to do a balance assertion on the sum of these accounts in time, i.e.

2020-01-01 balance Assets:US:Fidelity 30 USD

rather than asserting the balance of each individual sub-account (my reasons for this have to do with parsing html statements from Fidelity, which can be real pain if you are parsing via sub-account, but pretty straight-forward if parsing the total account amounts).

What are your suggestions for best going about this? I could always mirror-log a transaction to the combined Assets:US:Fidelity account whenever I log the same transaction to a subaccount, but that seems a bit cumbersome (and I would have to balance the transaction via a negative amount to some Expense account created for this purpose, which strikes me as inelegant).

Any suggestions are welcome :). Thanks again for your work.

[Daniele Nicolodi]

On 17/02/2021 09:28, David Karapetyan wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> Firstly, I wanted to compliment you on this brilliant project (and your
> excellent documentation in particular on double-entry accounting, useful
> particularly for people already working in technical fields). I had a
> question about balance assertions for investment accounts. Specifically,
> suppose I have the following two (and only two transactions) for Fidelity:
>
> Assets:US:Fidelity:SPAXX   10 USD
> Assets:US:Fidelity:FNILX 20 USD

This is not valid Beancoutn syntax. However, completing it in the most
straightforward way:

2020-02-17 * "Foo"
Assets:US:Fidelity:SPAXX 10.00 USD
Assets:US:Fidelity:FNILX 20.00 USD
Assets:Openings

these are two postings on a transaction, not two transactions. However,
I don't think semantics is part of your problem :-)

> I would like to do a balance assertion on the sum of these accounts in
> time, i.e.
>
> 2020-01-01 balance Assets:US:Fidelity 30 USD

This works out of the box (as long as you remember to open the
Assets:US:Fidelity account):

2020-02-17 open Assets:Openings
2020-02-17 open Assets:US:Fidelity
2020-02-17 open Assets:US:Fidelity:SPAXX
2020-02-17 open Assets:US:Fidelity:FNILX

2020-02-17 * "Foo"
Assets:US:Fidelity:SPAXX 10.00 USD
Assets:US:Fidelity:FNILX 20.00 USD
Assets:Openings

2020-02-18 balance Assets:US:Fidelity 31.00 USD

Can you post a self contained minimal example where it does not work?

Cheers,
Dan

[Martin Blais]

Further, it usually makes more sense to treat buy/sell on commodities in separate transactions.

This then allows you to eventually compute returns

See http://furius.ca/beancount/doc/returns

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[david e]

that's a highly useful documentation @martin. is it linked in the beancount docs (I don't remember seeing it there) and if not, are there more reports like this available? thank you!

[Martin Blais]

It's in the index:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RaondTJCS_IUPBHFNdT8oqFKJjVJDsfsn6JEjBG04eA/edit#heading=h.hzs9xa5699ul

It's fairly recent, so you might have missed it.

I'm planning another one on trading derivatives with Beancount.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/93500035-4144-4b5a-850e-a745ef0b5d40n%40googlegroups.com.