Purchases via debit card

[Gioele Barabucci]

Hello,

what is the most idiomatic way to express in Beancount that a certain
purchase has been done via a specific debit card?

I have a bank account with two debit cards: one for personal purchases
and one for work-related purchases. They are both billed to the same
bank account in a matter of seconds, so they are not really credit cards.

My current solution to track which card has been used is to create two
transactions with opposite amounts: one from the card (Liabilities) to
the payee (Expenses) and one from the card (Liabilities) to the account
(Assets):

2018-04-11 * "Train company" "Tickets to Place"
Liabilities:MyBank:WorkCard-123 -10.00 EUR
Expenses:Transports:Trains

2018-04-11 *
Liabilities:MyBank:WorkCard-123 10.00 EUR
Assets:MyBank:MyAccount

Is there a better way to express this? Maybe combining these two
transactions into one?

Regards,

--
Gioele Barabucci <gio...@svario.it>

[Zhen Cheng]

I am confused, why don’t you just create two sub accounts under the same bank account for these two debt cards?

Like,

Assets:MyBank:MyAccount:peronal-123
Assets:MyBank:MyAccount:work-456

Regards,

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Beancount" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to beancount+...@googlegroups.com.
> To post to this group, send email to bean...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/fb3887dd-4b83-a618-8deb-4f12508d09a8%40svario.it.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Martin Blais]

It goes to the same account

Book them all against the checking account

Use tags to differentiate

Filter by tags to produce numbers for your comment

[Martin Michlmayr]

* Zhen Cheng <wogo...@gmail.com> [2019-01-02 18:40]:

> I am confused, why don’t you just create two sub accounts under the same bank account for these two debt cards?

Because there's only one bank account with one pot of money.

Anyway, I think Gioele's solution is just fine as is Martin's
suggestion about using tags.

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

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

Hi Gioele, nice to meet you here!

On Wed, Jan 02, 2019 at 11:28:07AM +0100, Gioele Barabucci wrote:
> Is there a better way to express this? Maybe combining these two
> transactions into one?

I find it simpler/nicer to use metadata and a single transaction per
actual card usage, e.g.:

2018-04-11 * "Train company" "Tickets to Place"

author: "Zack"
card: "12345678"
Expenses:Transports:Trains 10.00 EUR
Assets:MyBank:MyAccount

In my case filling the card metadata is also easy to automate as the CSV
export from my bank contains the card number (well, the last 8 digits of
it, but it's generally enough for disambiguation purposes).

Cheers
--
Stefano Zacchiroli . za...@upsilon.cc . upsilon.cc/zack . . o . . . o . o
Computer Science Professor . CTO Software Heritage . . . . . o . . . o o
Former Debian Project Leader & OSI Board Director . . . o o o . . . o .
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »