How to use ledger in my (unusual) workflow?

[Alex]

I'm trying to use ledger in a way that helps my wife and me budget. I tried to do so last year, but we didn't end up sticking to it. We have settled on allocating funds by month and further splitting by week; the difficulty is that we often find ourselves needing flexibility, e.g. to get groceries at the end of one week rather than at the beginning of the next, so purely date-based methods don't work. We are currently using a Google Sheets document, which is working reasonably well, but I'm missing the ability to query like I would have with ledger.

I haven't found one yet, so I'm asking: is there a feature in ledger that makes these kinds of "custom pay periods" easy, or even possible, to manage?

Thanks.

[Simon Michael]

Would envelope budgeting work ? See
http://plaintextaccounting.org/#budgeting ->
envelope budgeting with plain transactions
for an example of what I mean.

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2016-08-05, at 02:53, Simon Michael <si...@joyful.com> wrote:

> Would envelope budgeting work ? See
> http://plaintextaccounting.org/#budgeting ->
> envelope budgeting with plain transactions
> for an example of what I mean.

Shameless plug: a simple example on my blog:
http://mbork.pl/2016-07-18_Ledger_%e2%80%93_virtual_postings_aka_envelopes

Hth,

--
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University

[Alexandre Rademaker]

Marcin,

http://mbork.pl/Comments_on_2016-07-18_Ledger_–_virtual_postings_aka_envelopes

Thanks for the post ! See my comment.

Alexandre
Sent from my iPhone

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2016-08-05, at 16:37, Alexandre Rademaker <arade...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Marcin,
>
> http://mbork.pl/Comments_on_2016-07-18_Ledger_–_virtual_postings_aka_envelopes
>
> Thanks for the post ! See my comment.

You're welcome, and good catch. I'll try to write something tomorrow.

> Alexandre
> Sent from my iPhone

Best,

[Alexandre Rademaker]

Maybe tomorrow you can be especially motivated to write, leaving ideas, who knows! I would appreciate some thoughts! ;-)

One of my nightmares is reimbursements. Every travel that I make for a conference start with the trip approval. Once the trip is approved, I can use the business credit card for buying all pre-trip expenses: the air tickets, conference registration, etc. During travelling, I can also use the business card for all expenses. For some expenses, I have to provide the receipts (air tickets, hotel, taxi, etc.), others are considered part of my per diem. 

Depending on the dates of the payments, not all expenses will be in the same credit card statement. I am responsible for paying the credit card and ask for reimbursement. I can ask my company to pay the refund to my personal account or direct to the credit card too.

Another difficult is the currency exchange rate. Since I must complete a reimbursement report, not after ten days of any payment, I generally need to complete the reimbursement report before having the credit card statement. Given that, I have to use the current day currency exchange rate when I am preparing the report. Once I have the statement, I must check the actual currency exchange rate utilised in the statement to calculate the difference and fill a complementary reimbursement report.

Does anyone share similar difficulties and would like to discuss how Ledger can help us with all this trouble?

--

Alexandre Rademaker

http://arademaker.github.io

[Martin Blais]

On Fri, Aug 5, 2016 at 4:39 PM, Alexandre Rademaker <arade...@gmail.com> wrote:

Maybe tomorrow you can be especially motivated to write, leaving ideas, who knows! I would appreciate some thoughts! ;-)

One of my nightmares is reimbursements. Every travel that I make for a conference start with the trip approval. Once the trip is approved, I can use the business credit card for buying all pre-trip expenses: the air tickets, conference registration, etc. During travelling, I can also use the business card for all expenses. For some expenses, I have to provide the receipts (air tickets, hotel, taxi, etc.), others are considered part of my per diem. 

Use the business CC as much as you can -- everything in there you claim.

Depending on the dates of the payments, not all expenses will be in the same credit card statement. I am responsible for paying the credit card and ask for reimbursement. I can ask my company to pay the refund to my personal account or direct to the credit card too.

For personal expenses, use a #tag and generate an income statement filtering on that tag.

 

Another difficult is the currency exchange rate. Since I must complete a reimbursement report, not after ten days of any payment, I generally need to complete the reimbursement report before having the credit card statement. Given that, I have to use the current day currency exchange rate when I am preparing the report. Once I have the statement, I must check the actual currency exchange rate utilised in the statement to calculate the difference and fill a complementary reimbursement report.

You're driving yourself crazy. 

First, transactions usually post within 2-3 days. Surely your bank has a website you can download the transactions from (... don't wait for the paper statement, in case you're making that mistake). I can't imagine your employer can't wait a week before you send them the expense report.

Second, using whatever exchange rate at the time of making the report won't make much of a difference over typical trip expense amounts. Your time is well worth the <$20 difference. Plus you can fix it later and request the different on your next expense report (or just forget about it).

Does anyone share similar difficulties and would like to discuss how Ledger can help us with all this trouble?

I used to do the same - tag transactions in my personal account, and then transfer out paid expenses from my company's account. Tags are sufficient for this problem.

--

Alexandre Rademaker

http://arademaker.github.io

On Aug 5, 2016, at 3:47 PM, Marcin Borkowski <mb...@mbork.pl> wrote:

On 2016-08-05, at 16:37, Alexandre Rademaker <arade...@gmail.com> wrote:

Marcin,

http://mbork.pl/Comments_on_2016-07-18_Ledger_–_virtual_postings_aka_envelopes

Thanks for the post ! See my comment.

You're welcome, and good catch.  I'll try to write something tomorrow.

Alexandre
Sent from my iPhone

Best,

--
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University

--

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[Alexandre Rademaker]

Thanks for the suggestions ! 

I didn't get the #tag idea , do you have examples ?! I was thinking in having accounts for the amount approved , for each reimbursement report and for the card statements. 

Yes, I am already using the online bank statements, but sometimes the difference in the exchange rate can be huge from the online statement for the final one. 

Best,

Alexandre 
Sent from my iPhone

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ledger-cli+...@googlegroups.com.

[Martin Blais]

On Sun, Aug 7, 2016 at 11:22 AM, Alexandre Rademaker <arade...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for the suggestions ! 

I didn't get the #tag idea , do you have examples ?! I was thinking in having accounts for the amount approved , for each reimbursement report and for the card statements. 

Tag the transactions whose expenses don't belong to you.

Tags and metadata are only a way to create arbitrary aggregations of transactions and postings and report on them.

[Ivan Stefanic]

On Wed, 27 Jul 2016 08:17:47 -0700 (PDT)
Alex <rpglo...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm trying to use ledger in a way that helps my wife and me budget. I tried
> to do so last year, but we didn't end up sticking to it. We have settled on
> allocating funds by month and further splitting by week; the difficulty is
> that we often find ourselves needing flexibility, e.g. to get groceries at
> the end of one week rather than at the beginning of the next, so purely
> date-based methods don't work. We are currently using a Google Sheets
> document, which is working reasonably well, but I'm missing the ability to
> query like I would have with ledger.

I don't really see that as a showstopper. You'll have more expenses in some
weeks, and less in other. It's going to even itself out pretty quickly.
It's not really worth rescheduling a trip to the store to happen a few days
sooner or later just to make a spreadsheet happy and money-wise it
accomplishes nothing.

Regular expenses (food, rent, transportation, health etc.) are not hard to
deal with, and I use simple budgeting from:
http://ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Budgeting

Just see how it works out over longer periods and adjust expectations
accordingly. (-p "this month" or -p "this year" or -p "last 6 months").

I do envelope budgeting with virtual transactions for stuff that costs
a lot relative to other expenses and happens irregularly. For me that's
bicycle equipment and maintenance, computer hardware and gadgets, clothes.

Those happen rarely, but when they do they affect some things I really
care about like average monthly expenses which change significantly
with a single transaction from one of those categories, so I have to
exclude them in some reports.

Average monthly expenses for me:
ledger r -A -M -n Expenses \
and not Expenses:Bike \
and not Expenses:Clothes \
... \
(| awk make-it-pretty)

> I haven't found one yet, so I'm asking: is there a feature in ledger that
> makes these kinds of "custom pay periods" easy, or even possible, to manage?

How custom? Do these help?
-p "last 6 weeks"
-p "last 3 months"
-p "this year"
-p "since 2015-06-19"
-p "since 2016-02 until 2016-04"

--
Ivan Stefanic <ivs...@sdf-eu.org>