Converting earnings to owner equity

[Daniel Schultz]

Hello all,

I'm using Beancount to track the books for a partnership.

At the end of the year I know that earnings are assigned to the `Earnings:Current` account (and any previous year's earnings are assigned to `Earnings:Previous`

Part of closing the books involves dividing those earnings between the partners according to the formula defined in our bylaws.  I had been doing this with a transaction similar to:

```

2023-01-01 * "Partners" "2022 allocations" ^2022-book-closing

  Equity:Earnings:Previous                                     1000.00 USD

  Equity:Capital:PartnerA                                         -600.00 USD

  Equity:Capital:PartnerB                                         -400.00 USD

```

This makes time constrained views look correct (since beancount populates past profit into Earnings:Previous which offsets these transfers).

However it results in odd reports when not viewing in a time frame (since beancount ONLY populates Earnings:Current, resulting in a positive `Earnings:Previous).

Using `Equity:Earnings:Current` as the base account results in the same kind of issue but in reverse (non-time views look fine, but time constrained views appear off)

What would you all recommend as the best entries to register these kinds of transactions / keep track of owner equity using Beancount?

Best,

 - Dan

--
Daniel Schultz (he / him)
@slifty

[Dan Schultz]

I think I solved this and wanted to share the solution for future searchers.

If earnings are being moved to partner equity accounts then there is no real concept of "previous" earnings any longer, and the solution is to combine them into one.
What I've done is set both "current" and "previous" earnings to be a single "Earnings" account, and partner allocations are debited from that account

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

2023-01-01 * "Partners" "2022 allocations" ^2022-book-closing

  Equity:Earnings                                                    1000.00 USD

  Equity:Capital:PartnerA                                         -600.00 USD

  Equity:Capital:PartnerB                                         -400.00 USD

```