>>>>> kinleyd <[email protected]> writes: > I already like the great flexibility ledger-cli provides for generating your > own reports, and for now I only have to wrap my mind around ledger-cli's use > of negative numbers. So far I get it with regard to income sources but have > been a bit befuddled when it comes to things like accounts payable, > receivable and retained earnings at the time of setting up initial balances. > I just need to chew upon it for a little while.
Thank you, Kinley! The negative numbers can certainly be odd from an accounting perspective. Be sure to check out the "--dc" option for your reports, which will separately report debits and credits against the total. The primary way to think about Ledger's use of signs is that everything is a flow, and Ledger is just recording the direction and magnitude of flow between accounts. This way, it doesn't need to know anything about accounting at all, which keeps the calculation engine simple -- but it requires you to apply some interpretation of your own to make best use of the resulting numbers. > What I'm really excited about is this - I think ledger-cli is the perfect > tool to teach accounting with. So much can be learned by trial and error > while trying to absorb fundamental accounting concepts, and the overhead is > just ledger-cli, boost, the command line and a text editor. I'm going to be > exploring this avenue. I would be very interested to hear what you come up with! Yours, John -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ledger" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
