How to Track Customer Expenses ? Should use Invoice: tags?

[Kev Lau]

Hi
I was wondering how do you track expenses on customers?
I would like to see the revenue generated by a customer to the expenses incurred over a period of time or a particular invoice?
Does this make sense?

Currently I have following entries for suppliers

EXPENSES:COGS:SUPPLIER:SUPPLIER_NAME  (COGS = cost of good sold)
EXPENSES:FREIGHT:FORWARDER_NAME

Money I get from a customer:-

REVENUE:SERVICED_REVENUE:CUSTOMER_NAME


Need to add something that would allow me to link the expenses and revenue so that I could see how much expenses is being incurred for the revenue.Any one done this?

Thanks
Kevin

[o1bigtenor]

Greetings Kevin

What I have done may be viewed as cumbersome but I am finding it working not too badly for me.

My account numbers  are 10 digits in a format like this xxxx.xx.xx.xx.

The first four correspond to GIFI codes and are there to simplify connecting to what other people are comfortable and know something about. (For GIFI see your federal taxation information areas.)

The next six is where I get the granularity that I need to keep track of what I want.

I'll give two examples:
1002.60.40.01

This is a cash savings account held in $CDN at a Canadian institution and it has a specific purpose identified as:

1002 Cash held in $CDN at a Canadian bank.

xxxx.60.xx.xx is a particular institution

xxxx.xx.40.xx is a designation that I use for savings accounts

xxxx.xx.xx.01 a designation for a specific account (have had multiple accounts at times)

You could use something like this to keep track of quite a few customers (99) with the present setup. If you need more (likely) group your customers using the xxxx.xx.12.xx area and you can now deal with 99 customers in 99 divisions or you have room for about 10 000 customers.

For expenses I might have something like:
9763.10.09.01

9763.xx.xx.xx is under the heading Machinery Expenses (for a farming business)

xxxx.10.xx.xx is what I have designated for on road (possibly on/off road as well) equipment

xxxx.xx.09.xx is what I have designated for a type of equipment

xxxx.xx.xx.01 is what I have designated for a specific piece of equipment

Yes I have the added pain of dealing with 6 more digits for account numbers - - - but the flexibility that I have is very very large.

I can track what type of expenditures and and every piece of equipment has which means that I can compare fuel consumption over a similar use time (I think). This will enable me to see when something is nickeling and diming me to where its time to replace it - - - again dependent upon use. If I am using a piece of equipment 20 hours of use in a year and it uses 12 liters of oil in the process it is wasteful of oil (VERY) but its not easy to justify replacing (even though i would really like to! or to a massive upgrade on).

Dee

[Kev Lau]

Hi Ajoeibin,
Thats a very granular approach but it seems very effective in tracking expenses for individual machines.
Interesting approach. I dont think I can go to that depth as you have as it will be very cumbersome. I  dont think I am ready to deal with so many digits in accounts(though I'll admit thats a pretty neat way to organize it).
Thanks for your input!

[o1bigtenor]

Thanks.

I decided to space things using the periods because things are far easier to read that way and the computer doesn't care.

Cumbersome are the utilities that use account numbers of 16 17 and even more digits. I generally ask them if they could ask for a digit or 2 more and then they could track every molecule in this galaxy.

I'm finding that this approach also lets me look at the expenses to each of the enterprises that make up my little business.

Good luck

Dee

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[Simon Michael]

Hi Dee,

I love hearing how people are doing things, thanks for sharing.

By using . instead of : as separator, don't you lose some of *ledger's
power ?

Well, thinking about it you may not lose much in practice. But with :
you could summarise things using --depth, eg.

[o1bigtenor]

I might give up some of *ledger's power but by using a . instead of : I can leave my hand on the numeric keypad when by using the colon I would require a hand shift three times for each such account number. I, disdaining, hand shifts decided a period would suffice. Sorry - - - I find the amount of time that I have to spend on paperwork onerous and would far rather do other things, yet the information that is developed is crucial. I, therefore, seek very much to minimize the time and effort. There are likely many other things that ledger could do for me but as the few things I have needed to do have been quite challenging to cause to function as I needed leaving me to assume that my time is better spent on getting things done and using brute force techniques rather than neat solutions because I lack the free time to add even more things onto my to do list!

Thanking you for the idea - - others might find it quite useful!

Dee

[Craig Earls]

That is what tab completion is for. 

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

[o1bigtenor]

On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 7:19 PM, Craig Earls <ende...@gmail.com> wrote:

That is what tab completion is for. 

When I look at the position of the tab key on my keyboard its use would still need extra keystrokes.

Secondly when I tried to use tab completion on Leafpad it didn't work. Rather than invest a lot of hours

into getting it to work I have been using the time to get my documents done. Maybe not an elegant
solution but it works.

Dee

[Craig Earls]

Leafpad!?!  You're an animal! :)

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[kinleyd]

On Tuesday, May 19, 2015 at 8:35:09 PM UTC+6, Craig Earls wrote:

Leafpad!?!  You're an animal! :)

 lol. I had to look up Leafpad to get the context.

Which is why I was curious as to why Dee doesn't use Emacs and ledger-mode - that combines minimalistic text editor (if not the simple environment) plus super efficient ledger support.

Kinley

[o1bigtenor]

Oh boy - - - likely going to be another text editor war (religious in nature) ahead.

I am minimally comfortable in Vi (more accurately vim) when I need to modify any system files or information.

Learning another text editor (for use only with ledger) doesn't seem to be a great use of my time (its in short enough supply as it is!).

From what I have used so far I primarily need an easy way to enter, and sometimes edit, text and digits.

With Leafpad I have NOT had to learn new ways of moving a cursor, I haven't had to learn new commands on how to edit, I haven't had to learn how to enter text, I haven't had to learn how to save documents.

Making it useful is that ledger commands, the few that I've used, seem to work.

So - - - for my purposes Leafpad works. Anything else would be more work and take more time.

Any techniques to make things easier with minimal time investment are useful. Things that take lots of time are put on a to do list that is already overwhelming!

Dee

 

Kinley

[Kinley Dorji]

No religious war from this side, I assure you. To each his/her own is what I live by. :)

Good explanation on why you prefer Leafpad over Emacs - Emacs does have quite a curve on a lot of fronts. Re ledger-mode: there's quite a bit in there from an efficiency point of view, but of course, it does call for emacs.

Kinley

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