How to specify financial year, e.g. for budgets

[david whiting]

Hi,

Ledger 3.1.2-20190205

OS: Ubuntu 19.10

New user here, experimenting with ledger. First I must say that so far I have been impressed with how quickly I've been able to figure out most of what I want to do. The documentation is excellent, extremely well-written and gets the balance right between readability and detail, something that I find is quite rare. One thing I haven't been able to figure out is whether it is possible to define the financial year, for budgeting etc. I'm running the accounts for a community club and our financial year is from the 1st of August. I would like to have an annual budget and have tried:

~ yearly from 2017/08/01

and

~ every year from 2017/08/01

These both start the period at the correct point in time, but then the next budget transaction is on 1st of January for the subsequent years. Is there anyway I can specify that the budget should always start from 1 August of each year?

Thanks,

David

[david whiting]

OK, I think I've got a way to do it. I'd be interested to know if this is the right or best way. I think that part of the problem was that I was not thinking about this in the right way and was trying to do too much in one go with historical data. For our club I set an annual budget and want to compare the actual expenditure against the budget at the end of the year. So I really only need to focus on one year at a time. So now in my ledger data file I have:

~  every 10 years from 2018/08/01 to 2019/07/31
   Expenses:Refs:T0007-R                        200 GBP
   Assets:Current Assets:Bank account

(I've used 10 years as an arbitrary time period, it could also have been 2 years)

And then when I run my report I use:

ledger -f byfc-ledger-test.dat --budget -b 2018-08-01 -e 2019-08-01 reg Expenses\:Refs\:T0007-R

This then gives me the sort of output I was expecting for that account. Is this the right approach?

David

[o1bigtenor]

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 3:28 AM david whiting <david.r...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> OK, I think I've got a way to do it. I'd be interested to know if this is the right or best way. I think that part of the problem was that I was not thinking about this in the right way and was trying to do too much in one go with historical data. For our club I set an annual budget and want to compare the actual expenditure against the budget at the end of the year. So I really only need to focus on one year at a time. So now in my ledger data file I have:
>
> ~ every 10 years from 2018/08/01 to 2019/07/31
> Expenses:Refs:T0007-R 200 GBP
> Assets:Current Assets:Bank account
>
> (I've used 10 years as an arbitrary time period, it could also have been 2 years)
>
> And then when I run my report I use:
>
> ledger -f byfc-ledger-test.dat --budget -b 2018-08-01 -e 2019-08-01 reg Expenses\:Refs\:T0007-R
>
> This then gives me the sort of output I was expecting for that account. Is this the right approach?
>

Am not skilled enough at ledger to comment on your report code but you
do have one flaw that I can see. (In the accounting logic.)
Your 'year' goes from YYYY-08-01 to YYYY+1-07-31 - - - - not to YYYY+1-08-01.

The way your date is written you are including the 1st day of the
following year - - - - which I do not think you want to do.

Regards