My wife and I have a rather unusual arrangement for dealing with shared expenses. Each payday, we each put an agreed-upon sum into a joint checking account. From that account, we pay regularly-occurring expenses like mortgage, utilities, etc. What makes our situation a bit more complex is that whenever possible, I put shared household expenses on a reward credit card which I also use for personal expenses.
Prior to 2021, I used to pay down the card by generating an online bill pay on the joint checking account web site for each separate transaction, for ease of auditing. This made it fairly easy to match up an expenditure on the card with a payment to the card issuer. Starting in 2021, I began to pay my credit card bill in full each month from my personal checking account, by allowing the card issuer to initiate a withdrawal for the necessary amount. I have used tags as follows: #hbc-andrew (my contributions) #hbc-amy (her contributions) #hbt-direct (a household expense paid directly from joint checking: e.g., mortgage or lawn care) #hbt-card (a household expense paid with Andrew's credit card) #hbr (monies paid from joint to cover household expenses charged to Andrew's credit card. To calculate annual budget, I bean-query for transactions tagged with #hbt- (either direct or indirect), sum each expense category by month, and write out an Excel worksheet with expense categories listed down column A and months across row 1, plus a column to get annual total and a row to get total by month. The problem is that because of double-entry bookkeeping, the whole thing sums to zero. How do I determine what source data to ignore here? Is there any way to get bean-query to filter on whether amount is more or less than zero? The contrib pages are a straight list of paydays, how much each partner contributed each payday, what the expected amount based on annual contrib / 365 x day of the year. The balance page is where I'm really baffled. The query picks up tags #hbt-card and #hbr and is meant to keep a running total of contributions vs. expenditures. A discrepancy here means that joint owes me money or I owe money to joint. It must balance to zero, or if not, a transfer in the appropriate direction will zero that out. Again, double-entry bookkeeping makes it less than obvious which data to ignore. Finally, is there another way to handle this rather unorthodox but functional (for us; YMMV) system that does not involve tags? All suggestions welcome. Thank you in advance! Long live beancount! Andrew Sent from Proton Mail for iOS -- 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/iEsg35NBna3oOyrgPY2vLks33Ac4yz7d8woAm68l7RviPd5_M8fr_IytH0tzqzr6kGYVyzksaodr0Wp3l3tn4JFBybx3WpXrma1zFvr_RF0%3D%40kramerthecat.com.
