Thanks for taking the time to think about it John!! I appreciate it :) On 2025-09-07, John Wiegley wrote: >>>>>> "TO" == Tavis Ormandy <[email protected]> writes: > >TO> $ ledger --file test.ldg bal --lots ^Assets:Bank >TO> $-5.00 >TO> $135.00 {£0.74074074} [04-Sep-2025] Assets:Bank > > Hmm… interesting question. Parts of the idea behind --lots is that you can use > --lot-notes if you only want the notes, or --lot-dates, etc. If you don’t care > about lot data, you shouldn’t need to see it. It IS, however, a fact that you > exchanged assets at a cost basis, which could have tax implications, etc. So > Ledger just tracks all the data, and leaves it up to you to craft the report > you want. >
Yes agreed, but when you swap $ for € at the airport on vacation, it feels like there should be a way to encode what you're doing. I just looked up the tax rules, in the UK the rule is: > A gain on the disposal of foreign currency acquired by an > individual for the personal expenditure outside the United Kingdom of > themselves and their family or dependents is not a chargeable gain The rules are similar in the US, except there is a cap of $200 gain per transaction before it's reportable. I think this matches how people intuitively treat currency conversion: unless you're a forex trader, it's not a commodity sale. > Mainly lots are being recorded so that when you convert back, it can > auto-generate a capital gain/loss transaction for you. But if you *never* want > that, I’m not quite sure what Ledger should do. This is the most basic form of > “I don’t track costs”: > > 2025/09/04 * Convert Currency > Assets:Bank £100.00 > Assets:Bank -$135.00 > Hmm, but this will implicitly create lots too, no? This seems funtionally identical to £100 @@ $135. > But it sounds like what you want is for one quantity to “transform” into the > other, without recording the details of the transformation. I don't know. When you sell a share of APPL stock, you don't record that the $10 you receive from your broker came from that sale -- it's the same as every dollar. Why when you sell $1 for a £1 is that different? I think the answer is that fungible currencies are special here, the tax code recognizes this with special treatment, and people consider them different to commodities. I'm not a finance guy, maybe I don't have the right language to articulate this :) > The main problem > here is that this will allow assets to “come into being from the aether” if > the value of pounds goes up and you transfer back to the tune of $145… This is > never allowed by double-entry, and would need a balancing transaction from > Equity to be lawful, hence the hledger approach… > > John > Not sure this is true... isn't the hledger approach worse? It just stuffs them into a hidden account so you can't see them... it just hides the messy problem under a rug :) Tavis. -- _o) $ lynx lock.cmpxchg8b.com /\\ _o) _o) $ finger [email protected] _\_V _( ) _( ) @taviso -- --- 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]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ledger-cli/109isjc%249k1%241%40ciao.gmane.io.
