balance report comparing balance at two dates?

[Richard Lyons]

A conventional balance sheet shows the previous year's balance in a separate column. 
Being able to do this with a trial balance is also useful.  I have not found any way
to achieve this -- am I missing something obvious again?


TIA
richard

[Craig Earls]

I do a similar thing by running ledger twice and combining the output in a shell script. The beauty of ledger is that the output is plain text so can be manipulated with scads of other tools. . 

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Craig, Corona De Tucson, AZ
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[Alexis H]

Craig,

would mind to share your script or even add it to contrib/?

Cheers,

Alexis

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Sent from mobile

[Martin Blais]

I've been meaning to make a multi-year version of this for a while, I think it's a useful report. In Beancount you'd write a Python script, load the contents of the file, create two or more "realization" objects (like a mapping) and merge them into a single table therein; pretty straightforward.

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[Martin Blais]

Actually, more generally, it might be useful to write a utility script that merges together multiple text reports that have a leftmost column of account names, and anything on the right (balances or otherwise). This would be a text-only operation and would work with the entire Ledgerverse.

[Martin Blais]

Ooooh that could even be implemented directly in BQL if bean-query supported JOINs and sub-selects, something like this:

       SELECT account, bal1, bal2 FROM

         (SELECT account, sum(cost(position)) as bal1 

          FROM CLOSE ON 2014-01-01 CLEAR) 

         JOIN

         (SELECT account, sum(cost(position)) as bal2 

          FROM CLOSE ON 2015-01-01 CLEAR) 

         ON account;

[Alexis H]

Hello Martin,

maybe this could also be done using Ledger's Python module.

And have a look at Ledger's select command, it allows sql like queries on ledger journals, I know too little about it, since I don't use it (yet ;).

[Richard Lyons]

Yes, please.  I would love to see that.  The main problem is that different
accounts may be absent in each of the two lists, so matching has to
interpolate both ways.

Cheers,
richard

[Simon Michael]

Also have a look at hledger balance -D/-W/-M/-Q/-Y for ideas. It's the
report I use the most often by far.

http://hledger.org/manual.html#multi-balance-reports

[Martin Blais]

Nice. 

It would be useful if you had example output in your doc.

[Simon Michael]

Agreed 100%. I've postponed that throughout my docs to save time and
maintenance costs, and because it needs some interesting data. I need to
look at your realistic sample journal again.

[Simon Michael]

For now: https://gist.github.com/simonmichael/85b1139360d245d13f1b