Questions about changes in equity account

[Jason Zhang]

Hello everybody,

I searched the beancount docs and Google Group and didn't find exactly what I needed, so maybe someone here can help me.

What is the best way to work with retained earnings? I see that the account Equity:Earnings:Current was generated automatically, but how do I interact with that?

I ask because ultimately I am looking for the answer on how to record equity payouts. For example, suppose I am recordkeeping for company XYZ. XYZ has $1000 in assets, $0 in liabilities, $600 in share capital, and $400 in retained earnings. XYZ then pays a distribution of $300 (e.g. dividends). The final result should be $700 in assets, $0 in liabilities, and $600 in share capital, and $100 in retained earnings. How would I record that distribution?

[Martin Blais]

On Sun, Jan 17, 2021 at 4:33 AM Jason Zhang <sct...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello everybody,

I searched the beancount docs and Google Group and didn't find exactly what I needed, so maybe someone here can help me.

What is the best way to work with retained earnings? I see that the account Equity:Earnings:Current was generated automatically, but how do I interact with that?

It's the OPEN operation in bean-query which summarizes all the past transactions and transfers balances of the account statement from those.

If you don't use bean-query, there's a function you can call in beancount.ops.summarize

 

I ask because ultimately I am looking for the answer on how to record equity payouts. For example, suppose I am recordkeeping for company XYZ. XYZ has $1000 in assets, $0 in liabilities, $600 in share capital, and $400 in retained earnings. XYZ then pays a distribution of $300 (e.g. dividends). The final result should be $700 in assets, $0 in liabilities, and $600 in share capital, and $100 in retained earnings. How would I record that distribution?

You've just answered your own question, insert a transaction for -300 assets +300 equity

Remember that equity is negative by default, so that's reducing it

 

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