Query arbitrary account balance in automated posting

[Richard Grayson]

Hi all,

I'm looking to set up a variant of envelope budgeting with Ledger, where a certain percentage of every Income gets put into an envelope unless the envelope has reached a certain threshold. For example, I may want to save up no more than a year's worth of monthly payments to a $5 subscription, so I would do something like

= /^Income/ and balance(Assets:Budgets:Foo) <= $60

    [Assets:Budgets:Foo]    0.1

    [Assets:Savings]            -0.1

I've scoured the ledger docs and random blog posts and can't seem to find a way to do this. Is it something that's possible and, if so, how?

[John Wiegley]

>>>>> "RG" == Richard Grayson <mbrya...@gmail.com> writes:

RG> = /^Income/ and balance(Assets:Budgets:Foo) <= $60
RG>     [Assets:Budgets:Foo]    0.1
RG>     [Assets:Savings]            -0.1

If such support existed -- and I'm not sure it does -- the syntax would likely
be:

= expr account =~ /^Income/ and account("Assets:Budgets:Foo").amount <= $60

John

[Michael Bryant]

I thought I responded to this, but I guess I didn't.

I tried that syntax and it didn't work. I'm assuming the support just doesn't exist right now.

As maintainer of Ledger, would you be willing to merge a pull request to support querying account information if I were to try to implement it?

I imagine the best implementation would be exposing all information via a struct-like syntax (as in your example). I can also run example syntax

by you before implementing anything, if that makes things easier.

[John Wiegley]

>>>>> "MB" == Michael Bryant <mbrya...@gmail.com> writes:

MB> As maintainer of Ledger, would you be willing to merge a pull request to
MB> support querying account information if I were to try to implement it? I
MB> imagine the best implementation would be exposing all information via a
MB> struct-like syntax (as in your example). I can also run example syntax by
MB> you before implementing anything, if that makes things easier.

I've pushed a commit to master that makes this work now:

= expr account =~ /^Income/ && account("Assets:Budgets:Foo").total <= $60

[Assets:Budgets:Foo] 0.1
[Assets:Savings] -0.1

2019-09-16 Payee
Assets:Budgets:Foo $40
Equity:Balances

2019-09-16 Payee2
Assets:Checking $100
Income

Turns out the support to do this _was_ there, it was just the query parser
that was broken (which is what gets used after '=' up there).

John

[Michael Bryant]

Thanks! This works. Any idea when the fix will appear in a new release?

[John Wiegley]

>>>>> "MB" == Michael Bryant <mbrya...@gmail.com> writes:

MB> Thanks! This works. Any idea when the fix will appear in a new release?

Given that we released recently, it may be a while...

John