divide amounts to (owned/external) postings by percentage

[Maximilian Held]

Hi all,

I want to share expenses among my personal use, my business and a flatmate.

For example, a transaction could look like this:

```

2023-03-31 * "PowerCo" "Electrical Power for Q1"

  Assets:BankFoo                             -100 EUR

  Expenses:Personal                           40 EUR  ; 40% of above

  Expenses:MyBiz                                30 EUR  ; 30% of above

  Assets:Receivables:FlatmateBob  30 EUR  ; 30% of above

```

I'm facing these complications:

1. I want to apply these percentages automatically (i.e. just write the 40/30/30 split), not calculate the amounts by hand. (There are a lot of these splits).
2. I want MyBiz to be in my ledger, but for tax reporting reasons, I still need to be able to report its expenses separately, including lots of shares of otherwise personal expenses. MyBiz is just me doing freelance work; there is no separate legal entity (or even bank account) -- I don't want there to be "fake" transactions of MyBiz given myself income (etc.). By contrast, FlatmateBob, with whom I'm sharing some costs is a separate legal entity, and we have actual  transactions (balancing out our mutual receivables).

I've gotten a lot of mileage out of the expense splitting plugins. I'm now recording the above tx using SEIAROTg marvellously fully-featured autobean.share:

```

2023-03-31 * "PowerCo" "Electrical Power for Q1"

  Assets:BankFoo                             -100 EUR

  Expenses

    share-MySelf: 4

    share-MyBiz: 3

    share-FlatmateBob: 3

```

This is a lot more efficient (there's even named sharing policies in beancount.share!), and I get a glorious fava-view for FlatmateBob included, which makes our lives a lot easier.

But, there's the problem of MyBiz: This is now also an external entity. Right away, MySelf's Assets are inflated (by fake MyBiz'  receivables), and I'd need to add "fake" transactions to smooth things out.

Again, I'm aware that I could go just have MyBiz a separate ledger, but that comes with a lot of overhead and fakery that I just don't want. MyBiz should be a set of accounts (like you might have for clients or employers), not an entity cluster of my activities.

So I'm facing a dilemma. I can either

1. Post things to accounts by hand as at the top; everything will be correct, but there'll be a lot of drudgery.
2. Use a sharing plugin, but then I need to treat every percentage-sharing as a separate entity, which isn't right.

To resolve this:

1. I need to find/build a generic declare-posting-by-plugin. I haven't been able to find one, and I'm not sure that's well defined / makes sense.
2. I need a way to declare to sharing plugins that MyBiz and I are the same entity, and we don't have mutual receivables. (The again incredible autobean.share plugin has special nobody and everyone "viewpoints" which come very close, but they're all or nothing -- though a ticket mentions a planned "we" viewpoint)

SEIAROTg's and other sharing-plugin magic aside; how would you go about this problem?

Many thanks

Max