Over the Christmas break I went on Bahá’í pilgrimage to the holy sites in Haifa, Israel. It was a nine day stay in Haifa, with three extra days spent traveling and resting in Tel Aviv.
Three of us went: my wife and I, and my mother-in-law. We wanted to avoid the confusion of who pays for what, so we just pooled all our money together, assigned me as the accountant, and after the trip I was supposed to figure out exactly how much each person owed, less what they originally put into the pot. These finances were further complicated by having to deal with three currencies (USD, Euros, and New Israeli Shekels), and the use of both cash in two currencies, Traveler’s Checks in US dollars, and my MasterCard.
This is just such a case where my double-entry accounting tool, Ledger, ought to shine. Imagine keeping track of all those details in Quicken — which doesn’t even support multiple currencies in a “cash” type account! (At least, it didn’t the last time I used Quicken).
Anyway, not only did my general ledger happily balance to zero at the end (and, because of the double-entry book-keeping, found many errors in my paper register), but I knew exactly how much to pay each person back, and even how much money I lost due to the conversion from dollars to shekels and back again. All this accounting work was done today using the Common Lisp version of Ledger (CL-Ledger), and took just under 3 hours to complete with 65 entries total and 172 transactions.
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Hi,
I’m just preparing my New Year’s resolution for 2009 … getting my finances in order … and I hope to use Ledger and Aquamacs to do it.
I found this comment, and even though it is over a year old, I was wondering if you could share a few of the details of how you structured this ledger.
* Did you use a separate ledger for this trip, or were your entries in the same ledger as your personal finances?
* How did you discover the loss from roundtrip currency conversions?
* How do you label your currencies? (I find ascii $ works fine, but £ shows up in emacs as £ (if typed into Terminal) and shows up in Terminal as ? (if typed in Emacs). I’ve switched to GBP until Emacs supports UTF-8 NCD)
* How did you deal with using a USD based Mastercard to pay for a Shekels meal? Do you have to wait until you get your Mastercard statement to determine the exchange rate or extra fees for international usage?
* Your blog suggests that you kept a paper ledger during the trip, and only used Ledger after you got home. Would it have worked if you’d used Ledger in real-time?
* What accounts did you use? How many of each type (Income, Equity, Liability, Expense, Asset?)
* What did your most basic entries look like?
* What were your most complex entries, and what lessons did you learn from them? Did you restructure your accounts along the way because of an unforeseen wrinkle?
* What ledger command lines did you use to compute the amount owed by each person?
I know that’s a lot of questions; please don’t feel required to answer all of them to feel helpful. At this stage, any discussion will help me.
Hi Ben,
I used the same ledger as for all of my finances. Just one big file with nearly 6000 entries in it by now.
I discovered the loss because I can compare the money spent on foreign currencies with the total market value of what I spent.
I usually label my currencies EUR for euro, NIS for New Israeli Shekel, etc. You can use UTF-8 with Ledger, but the support is not ideal yet.
Yes, I had to wait for my statement to come in order to record one side of the transaction in NIS, and the other, MasterCard, side in dollars.
I could have entered Ledger entries in real-time with a palmtop computer! But I just recorded what was spent on each item, and its category, in a small paper book.
The accounts were mainly expenses, assets:cash and liabilities:mastercard.
The most basic entries were something like this (hope formatting is not destroyed):
2007/12/23 Coffee shop
Expenses:Food NIS 23.00
Assets:Cash:Pilgrimage
My most complex entry was something like:
2007/12/22 Fish restaurant
Expenses:Food NIS 361.00
Liabilities:Payable:Giti NIS 80.00
Liabilities:NRL:MasterCard NIS -441.00
Expenses:Tips NIS 50.00
Assets:Cash:Pilgrimage NIS -50.00
Note that I have yet to reconcile this part of my mastercard balance, in which case the -441 should be a dollar figure.
I just used `ledger -b BEGIN -e END bal` to generate the balance over the specific period.