Balance question / puzzle

[Remco Rijnders]

Hi all,

I am working on some tax returns, and am seeing something which, to my
amateur eyes, seems strange. When I run a balance report for my entire
ledger that covers multiple years, I come to one amount. However, when I
then run balances for the individual years, the balances don't add up
together.

Please see below an example of what I did for the "income" account which
consists of several sub accounts and I also have multiple currencies. In
order to not reveal confidential information, I have introduced a random
currency 'RND' with a single fixed exchange rate to my normal reporting
currency.

$ ledger bal -f balance-question.ledger income -e 2017-01-01 -X RND | head -1; ledger bal -f balance-question.ledger income -b 2017-01-01 -e 2018-01-01 -X RND | head -1; ledger bal -f balance-question.ledger income -b 2018-01-01 -e 2019-01-01 -X RND | head -1; echo; ledger bal -f balance-question.ledger income -e 2019-01-01 -X RND | head -1
RND -261127,97 income
RND -174407,32 income
RND -226957,44 income

RND -661750,74 income

Adding these numbers up, I would expect a total balance of RND -662492,73
instead of the total balance of -661750,74 I find now. This poses an issue
for me as I determine my profit by subtracting my yearly expenses from my
yearly income and I expect the profit of year 1, plus year 2, plus year 3,
to be equal to my total profit over the years.

Can someone else see a similar issue with their own balances? Or am I
misunderstanding something as to how balances should align with each
other? When I run a register report for these 3 periods and for the 1
total period instead of a balance report, I get the same numbers for both.

I wonder if it can somehow be explained by the exchange rates / commodity
values that are selected when including date criteria?

Any ideas?

Kind regards,

Remco Rijnders

[Jostein Berntsen]

Can you run the commands with the --historical option and see if that
makes a difference?


Jostein