2019.10.24 00:00

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


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