How to book loses?

[Ivan Petrov]

Hi everyone,

One simple question: Should i book loses to Income:PnL, or should it be something like Expenses:PnL?

I have searched through the mailing list and documentation, but unfortunately, haven't found an answer. The idea is always around profits.

[Martin Michlmayr]

* Ivan Petrov <ivanpet...@gmail.com> [2024-06-30 00:29]:

I use Expenses:Capital-loss

--
Martin Michlmayr
https://www.cyrius.com/

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Sun, Jun 30, 2024 at 10:41:55PM +0800, Martin Michlmayr wrote:
> * Ivan Petrov <ivanpet...@gmail.com> [2024-06-30 00:29]:
> > One simple question: Should i book loses to Income:PnL, or should it be
> > something like Expenses:PnL?
> >
> > I have searched through the mailing list and documentation, but
> > unfortunately, haven't found an answer. The idea is always around profits.
>
> I use Expenses:Capital-loss

This is a recurring dilemma for me in many similar situations. (Another
one being reimbursements for work missions, where sometime you gain some
money, sometimes you lose some.)

Ideally you should book separately Income:Capital-gain and
Expenses:Capital-loss. But then to query your "net" result you need to
subtract one from the other and, last time I checked at least, Beanquery
didn't allow to have one derived column with the difference between two
other columns. (Nor Fava supports anything like that in an ergonomic way
out of the box.)

The alternative is going for Expenses:PnL (or Income:PnL) and book
everything under that single account. The main drawback for is that
checks I have for all expenses (or all incomes) based on account names
are more difficult to apply/enforce.

I'd really love to have a general and ergonomic solution to this
problem.

Cheers
--
Stefano Zacchiroli . za...@upsilon.cc . https://upsilon.cc/zack _. ^ ._
Full professor of Computer Science o o o \/|V|\/
Télécom Paris, Polytechnic Institute of Paris o o o </> <\>
Co-founder & CTO Software Heritage o o o o /\|^|/\
https://twitter.com/zacchiro . https://mastodon.xyz/@zacchiro '" V "'