I find being able to specify different dates for different legs (aka postings) of a transaction to be valuable. I was using a plugin I'd hacked up for a long while, and I finally got around to rewriting it to allow for per-posting dates with configurable holding accounts. Sharing it. Feedback welcome:
https://github.com/redstreet/beancount_plugins_redstreet/tree/master/effective_date Cases where I use it: - booking a tax refund to the correct year - booking the last paycheck of the year to the correct year (when it gets deposited a day later in the next year) - spread a lumpsum expense across time (eg: booking insurance premiums paid upfront for one year across several months) - booking expenses to the correct month (eg: rent paid a couple days before the start of a month) etc. The plugin also inserts a beancount link to link the original transaction and all its associated newly inserted transactions to help you find them easily in beancount or fava. Here's the README: Effective dates plugin for Beancount Double entry bookkeeping requires each transaction to occur instantaneously in time. In Beancount, that translates to each transaction occuring on a single date. However, it is occasionally useful to view different legs of a transaction occuring across difference periods of time. For example, consider: 2014-12-15 * "Annual Insurance payment for 2015" Liabilities:Credit-Card 100 USD Expenses:Insurance Here, the payment was made in Dec 2014 for an expense to be booked to 2015. To reflect this, one could book it thus: 2014-12-15 * "Annual Insurance payment for 2015" Liabilities:Credit-Card 100 USD Assets:Hold:Insurance 2015-01-01 * "Annual Insurance payment for 2015" Assets:Hold:Insurance -100 USD Expenses:Insurance The expense is booked in 2015, while the credit card transaction, in 2014. The "Assets:Hold:Insurance" holds the money for the period in between. This plugin automates the process above. One can simply enter a single transaction with an 'effective_date' metadata field for the posting (not the transaction) that needs to occur later (or earlier): 2014-12-15 * "Annual Insurance payment for 2015" Liabilities:Credit-Card 100 USD Expenses:Insurance effective_date: 2015-01-01 The plugin also allows for legs to occur on multiple different dates. For example: 2015-02-01 * "Car insurance: 3 months" Liabilities:Mastercard -600 USD Expenses:Car:Insurance 200 USD effective_date: 2015-03-01 Expenses:Car:Insurance 200 USD effective_date: 2015-04-01 Expenses:Car:Insurance 200 USD effective_date: 2015-05-01 The examples.bc shows you how the plugin can be configured for your choice of holding accounts. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Beancount" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to beancount+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/955c773f-2957-4b08-b63c-a68422ab1006%40googlegroups.com.
