A few questions about ledger-mode and reconciliation

[Alan Schmitt]

Hello,

I just did my first account reconciliation using ledger-mode, and I'm
amazed at how streamlined the process is. I still have a suggestion and
a question about it.

Suggestion: provide auto-completion when choosing an account to
reconcile.

Question (bug?): I had to add a transaction during reconciliation, so
I hit 'a' as suggested in the manual. However, the added transaction did
not appear in the narrowed buffer, so I could not edit it. I had to quit
the reconciliation process, edit the transaction, then restart the
reconciliation. Maybe a way around this (if the narrowing is based on
a search for the account name) would be to set the account being
reconciled on the added transaction (and this would be one fewer thing
to type).

Thanks a lot,

Alan

[Craig Earls]

If you put point inside an account, it will be suggested as the
account to reconcile.

With respect to the problem you reported, did you add a transaction
that had a posting to the account your were reconciling? I do that
pretty frequently and haven;t had that problem.


Oh, and emacs version please.

> --
>
> ---
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ledger" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ledger-cli+...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.



--
Craig, Corona De Tucson, AZ
enderw88.wordpress.com

[Alan Schmitt]

Craig Earls <ende...@gmail.com> writes:

> If you put point inside an account, it will be suggested as the
> account to reconcile.

Ah, good to know, thanks.

> With respect to the problem you reported, did you add a transaction
> that had a posting to the account your were reconciling? I do that
> pretty frequently and haven;t had that problem.

I'm not sure to understand what you mean by "that had a posting". I was
reconciling a statement from by bank account, and there was
a transaction there that was not in ledger. I hit 'a', entered a date,
but I did not see anything change in the window containing the ledger
file.

When I stop the reconcile process ('q'), I can see in the (no longer
narrowed) ledger window the date that was entered, ready for
a transaction to be completed (as if I had done a "C-c C-a").

Note that I'm using the default for "Ledger Narrow on Reconcile", which
is 't', so it seems that only transactions for the account being
reconciled are being shown.

> Oh, and emacs version please.

GNU Emacs 24.3.1 (x86_64-apple-darwin13.0.0, Carbon Version 1.6.0 AppKit
1265) of 2014-01-16 on top-wifi.irisa.fr

Thanks,

Alan

[Craig Earls]

Ahh...using 'a' from the reconcile windows puts you into the mini
buffer! Add the date the payee and the amount and it will match to
something similar in the main file.

[Alan Schmitt]

Craig Earls <ende...@gmail.com> writes:

> Ahh...using 'a' from the reconcile windows puts you into the mini
> buffer! Add the date the payee and the amount and it will match to
> something similar in the main file.

I see, I did not know I could put additional information when inputting
the date in the mini-buffer.

I have a small issue with it: when I use additional information, the
dates are not formatted correctly (they use '/' instead of '-'). I have
customized 'ledger-use-iso-dates' to 't' and set
'ledger-default-date-format' to "%Y-%m-%d" (there is no customize
interface for the latter by the way). Looking a bit at the code, I see
that adding a transaction this way calls the 'xact' command of ledger.
However I don't see how to add an option (such as "-y %Y-%m-%d") to
the call to the binary. I ended up using the ".ledgerrc" init file to
get the correct format.

It would also be quite useful to have an optional additional parameter
when adding the transaction, positioned to the account being reconciled.
This way one would be able to omit it and the transaction's account
would be correctly set (when playing with it, I had a couple cases
where a transaction matched, but with an account different from the one
being reconciled, so the added transaction would not appear in the
narrowed buffer). Unfortunately I don't know enough emacs-lisp to add an
optional argument to a function called through "call-interactively".

Thanks,

Alan

[Craig Earls]

Thanks Alan,
I actually rarely use the 'a' function because of exactly why you
are criticizing. I am not particularly fond of ledgers xact command.
I find it to be a bit too 'fuzzy' and it finds transactions to copy
that I didn't really mean. If I need to add a transaction while
reconciling I just switch to the ledger buffer and add the
transaction, when you save the file the recon window will be updated.

Let me look into you date format issue, I use iso dates as well and do
not have that problems.