Also, I pasted your message into GPT with a “can you give them example beancount transactions for their use case?” at the end:
1) Dinner day (you front the whole bill; record your share as expense, friends as IOUs) 2025-08-01 * "Miya Sushi" "Group dinner" ^grp-dinner-2025-08-01 ; You can add real-world details on the txn or postings: ; auth_date: 2025-08-01 Expenses:Food:DiningOut 60.00 USD Assets:Receivable:Friends:Alice 60.00 USD Assets:Receivable:Friends:Bob 60.00 USD Assets:Receivable:Friends:Carol 60.00 USD Liabilities:CC:Chase -240.00 USD 2) Reimbursements arrive by Zelle on different days (clear the IOUs) 2025-08-03 * "Zelle from Alice" ^grp-dinner-2025-08-01 ; posted: 2025-08-03 Assets:Bank:Checking 60.00 USD Assets:Receivable:Friends:Alice -60.00 USD 2025-08-04 * "Zelle from Bob" ^grp-dinner-2025-08-01 Assets:Bank:Checking 60.00 USD Assets:Receivable:Friends:Bob -60.00 USD 2025-08-04 * "Zelle from Carol" ^grp-dinner-2025-08-01 Assets:Bank:Checking 60.00 USD Assets:Receivable:Friends:Carol -60.00 USD It gave a much more comprehensive answer, you might want to check it out for yourself! On Wednesday, August 20, 2025 at 10:02:42 AM UTC-7 [email protected] wrote: > Hi All, > > I'm getting started using bean count and something that's throwing me off > is keeping track of transactions over multiple days. > > An example might be dinner with a group of friends. On the day of, I might > put my card down to pay. Over the next 1-2 days, my credit card would post, > I'd receive bonus points, and my friends might send me a Zelle with their > payments. This process would span 4-5 days. Ideally, the sum of this > process would come out to zero and I could verify this with bean count, > ensuring that all money is accounted for. I could also tag each posting > with the actual date it happened, so I can double check with my printed > statements. > > My issue with bean count as I've learned it so far is that transactions > are limited to single days. I either need to sacrifice point-in-time > accuracy to record all postings on a single day, or sacrifice easy > verifiability and recording postings as separate transactions. Right now, > I'm going with option two and linking together the separate transactions, as > the docs seem to suggest > <https://beancount.github.io/docs/beancount_language_syntax.html#links>. > This is working okay right now, but I'm having to go through my links and > manually verify them. > > I did find this proposal > <https://beancount.github.io/docs/settlement_dates_in_beancount.html> for > settlement dates, which would seem to be the solution I'm looking for. > However, it's dated back 10 years and I don't think it's been actioned > upon. > > Does anyone have advice to share on accounting for these drawn out > transactions? > > Thanks, > Yogesh > -- 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 [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/c85187bd-eb56-482a-b844-f8453839cb92n%40googlegroups.com.
