Declaring dividends

[Aragon]

Hello,

For someone who uses Beancount to keep the books of a small company, I was wondering what is the correct convention for declaring dividends?

After reading about this in general accounting documents, it seems like in Beancount one should add to the Equity:Earnings:Previous account, and subtract from a Liabilities:Dividends-Payable account.

However, in Beancount the Equity:Earnings:Previous account is a sort of "virtual" account which is usually not opened in the journal, whose balance is auto-generated. If I do open that account so that I'm able to write transactions to it, its balance is always visible in Fava's balance sheet, which I'm not sure, but it looks a bit odd.

And if I use a different equity account, eg. Equity:Dividends, then the Equity:Earnings:Previous balance doesn't get calculated correctly, ie. it looks as though the company has a delicious balance of previous earnings when it has actually declared them as dividends.

Thanks,

Aragon

[Martin Blais]

The previous earnings account is just where  net income from the time before the start of the reporting period goes, but I think you should be able to add postings to it, there little really that special about it, it's just another account.

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[Dan Schultz]

Hey Aaragon, this sounds similar to a question I had earlier this year: https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/uh6MjyOis9M/m/Qxix6NJJAQAJ

The solution I came up with was to define a common account for both previous AND current earnings by setting the following two options:

```
option "account_current_earnings" "Earnings"
option "account_previous_earnings" "Earnings"
```

I believe that all fava interfaces will either have a "previous" or "current" earnings, so if you simplify them both to a single `Earnings` and draw from that account you should have sensible numbers on all reports.

Best,

 - Dan

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Dan Schultz

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