On 8/16/15 2:33 PM, Mark Scannell wrote: > Some challenges and reasons to move beyond this: > - Income can be occasional, monthly, more secure or less secure (eg bonus, > shares). This is becoming more significant for me. > - Long term savings can be locked-in pension, cash, or various forms of > long term investments that are sellable (eg buy-to-let, ISA accounts) > - Expenses can be optional. Some things can be dropped without significant > impact. (Holidays, renovations) > - Expenses aren't regular. Some are prepaid for a year (eg insurance), some > are prepaid for a few years (eg car). > - Expenses can be time-bound. Specifically, large childcare expenses aren't > forever. Or lost-income due to unpaid maternity time.
These seem to point towards refining your chart of accounts - adding/reorganizing categories to bring out more of the details you're interested in. Eg once expenses are categorized as fixed/optional, you can more easily play what-if by filtering out the optional. > Some reports I'd love to get: > - See how I'm trending. How would my change of net worth be in 12 months if > I continue on the same course? > - See how things could change. What if I earned more? Earned less? Took on > more expensive childcare? > - How is my liquidity position? If I were to take on a longer-term > investment, or leverage myself up, how easily could I cover my > debts/de-leverage? > - How is my liquidity position trending? These seem (mostly ?) about projecting into the future. Two approaches to consider: in one, you use Ledger's automatic transactions to generate recurring transactions arbitrarily far into the future. In the other, you generate the journal entries yourself (eg with editor macros) and just save them in a file, eg future.ledger, which also includes your current ledger. The first approach will require expertise if you want to model one-off and irregular future transactions. The second seems more tedious, but not if you're expert with your editor, and it's simple and gives full control. And of course you could combine both. I currently use the second approach and just run reports in the usual way. For what-ifs I may use temporary account aliases or extra included files. For quick balance-over-time charts, I use hledger-web, or for something more complex I would export report data as CSV to a spreadsheet and do the charting there. -- --- 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.
