Hide/aggregate lot accounts when tracking investments

[Ryan]

I'm considering using hledger to track investment lots since I use it for other accounting. I've read this guide which seems reasonable. My concern is that having a separate account for each lot will clutter up reports and hledger-ui. The more I trade the more cluttered it will be.

We can hide/aggregate accounts with --depth but "lot" accounts aren't necessarily all at the same depth. They're also not necessarily deeper than other accounts that aren't lots which means aggregating them with --depth would also aggregate non-"lot" accounts at that same depth and deeper.

Is there any other way to aggregate accounts than by depth? Maybe with a pattern or something?

[Simon Michael]

Yes, you can temporarily hide & aggregate with account aliases. Eg if your lot account leaf names are all digits, add

 --alias '/:[0-9]+$/='

I also arrange the account tree to keep most lots at the same depth, where possible, which just makes things easier eg for zooming in and out in hledger-ui.

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[Ryan]

That's cool! And an unexpected use of aliases! Thanks

[Ryan]

I stumbled on a minor gotcha with opening balances and using aliases to aggregate lots.

I've been using balance assignments for opening balances. To start tracking lots I broke out the 2022 opening balance posting for an asset into separate lots, one for each purchase made last year. So, for example

Opening balances

    assets:ABC        = 100

became

Opening balances

    assets:ABC:20211001        = 30

    assets:ABC:20211101        = 40

    assets:ABC:20211201        = 30

That works fine when they're not aggregated but when I aggregated the lots into assets:ABC with an alias then the opening balance was 30 instead of 100. To fix I removed the = and used regular postings instead of balance assignments for lot opening balances.

Opening balances

    assets:ABC:20211001        30

    assets:ABC:20211101        40

    assets:ABC:20211201        30

But it confused me for a bit since I was dealing with more postings and larger numbers. Just sharing in case others find this conversation, try aliases and run into the same issue.

- Ryan

[Simon Michael]

Thanks for the note. I most avoid balance assignments as they allow too much variability in different situations.

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