I want to be able to track how my expenses matches my budget. And to do that, as other people also recommended, I used a feature in ledger called virtual postings and automated transactions.
Budgeting
I add a budget for every week
2019/10/01 Budget
[Budget:Yarikuri] JPY 6,000
[Equity:Budget]
2019/10/07 Budget
[Budget:Yarikuri] JPY 7,000
[Equity:Budget]
Automated transactions
Then these will auto deduct from my budget. By using Unbudgeted
as suggested here, I can track expenses outside of my budget
= /Expenses/
[Budget:Unbudgeted] -1.0
[Equity:Budget] 1.0
= /Expenses:Control:Food/
[Budget:Yarikuri] -1.0
[Budget:Unbudgeted] 1.0
= /Expenses:Control:House/
[Budget:Yarikuri] -1.0
[Budget:Unbudgeted] 1.0
Paying with points
The problem I had was that I don’t want payments with points counted towards decreasing my budget but I still want to see the total expenses. I’ve been calculating manually so far (doh!). I manage this by adding back the budget for every payment I made with points
2019/10/01 Supermarket
Expenses:Control:Food JPY 100
Income:Point JPY -100
[Budget:Yarikuri] JPY 100
[Equity:Budget] JPY -100
Reporting
So I can have reports on how much I’ve used my budget so far by:
ledger bal ^Budget and not payee Budget
And get the remaining budget I have by:
ledger bal ^Budget
Also the total budget that I have as:
ledger reg ^Budget and payee Budget --start-of-week monday -W