Asserting closing balance?

[James Cook]

This is a minor issue, easy to work around, but I'm wondering if I'm
missing something.

How should I assert that an account's balance was 0 after it closed?
I'd like to be able to write

2020-11-09 close Liabilities:Scotiabank:Visa
2020-11-10 balance Liabilities:Scotiabank:Visa 0 CAD

but beancount complains: "Invalid reference to inactive account
'Liabilities:Scotiabank:Visa'".

I can't change the balance date to 2020-11-09 because I have a
transaction on the closing date.

I have worked around it with

2020-11-10 close Liabilities:Scotiabank:Visa
note: "Actually closed 2020-11-09."
2020-11-10 balance Liabilities:Scotiabank:Visa 0 CAD

but that seems messy.

James

[Martin Blais]

Workarounds is what I was going to suggest.

Maybe the code should be changed to allow for a balance directive the day after.

(Balance is defined at the start of day.)

Another idea would be to write a plugin that automatically checks that inventories are empty - for all currencies - on closing, everywhere, automatically.

That ought to exist and would be easy to write (and should be included in beancount/plugins by default if you ask me).

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[Justus Pendleton]

On Sunday, November 15, 2020 at 12:30:55 AM UTC+7 James Cook wrote:

This is a minor issue, easy to work around, but I'm wondering if I'm
missing something.

There's an open issue for this and last year I implemented a variant of it

https://groups.google.com/g/beancount/c/3ItOYS9DJx4/m/ENDoYpk5DgAJ

But while doing so I realized that the easy implementation originally suggested in the ticket had exactly the problem you're running into so I didn't spend much energy trying to get my PR merged.

I just use the workaround in the meantime.

[Martin Blais]

FWIW, I've preserved your PR in the transition to GitHub as pr137_hoostus_balanceend, it's in the repository.

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[Martin Blais]

Here, solved your problem by allowing Balance directives after closure:

https://github.com/beancount/beancount/commit/12f0e87012fbb5ef7ee11d12bcb6d0c9944ac587

Read commentary and patch for justification.

[Justus Pendleton]

On Tuesday, November 17, 2020 at 12:35:59 PM UTC+7 bl...@furius.ca wrote:

Here, solved your problem by allowing Balance directives after closure:

https://github.com/beancount/beancount/commit/12f0e87012fbb5ef7ee11d12bcb6d0c9944ac587

Read commentary and patch for justification.

This seems like a good solution to the problem. I can't really think of any reason not to be able to assert a balance for a closed account. It also probably makes a "balance at end of day" statement more trouble than it is worth.

[James Cook]

Thanks, Martin. It works for me.

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