@@ -397,96 +397,119 @@ historical special-case. The solution was originally design for the
following scenario:
Suppose an expense was expected — for example, a situation where you
gave a credit card number to charge something and the charge never came
through — but it turns out the charge never happened.
The recommended way to resolve this problem in the system is to just delete
the entry entirely from the Ledger file, and allow the VCS to log the fact
that the charge was expected, but the vendor never billed the credit card.
The reason the `NEVER CHARGED` payee text was added was to handle the
situation where the books included this charge, but the books were already
closed for the financial period (e.g., the books had already been audited).
Changing the payee was a method for documenting the expense. You might use
it like this:
2011/05/28 My Bad Billing Hosting - NEVER CHARGED
Liabilities:Credit Card:Visa $-100.00
Expenses:Conservancy:Hosting $100.00
2012/01/01 My Bad Billing Hosting - REVERSAL - NEVER CHARGED
Liabilities:Credit Card:Visa $100.00
Expenses:Conservancy:Hosting $-100.00
However, going forward, you'd likely never enter anything the ledger
**until** you had real proof via an Invoice, Receipt or Statement that showed
the Expense did/should occur. This use of `NEVER CHARGED` in the payee is
thus deprecated.
#### Income Account Documentation
Each `Income:` account must have the following tags:
* One of: [`Invoice:`](#invoice-tag),
[`PurchaseOrder:`](#purchase-order-tag),
[`Statement:`](#statement-tag) or
[`Contract`](#contract-tag). Exceptions to this requirement are as follows:
+ the income generated from the transaction is less than $800, or
+ the `IncomeType` is `RBI` and the income is for a defined, public
program (such as conference registration)
* An [`Entity:`](#entity-tag) tag, *iff.* the Income for the transaction is
for more than $800.
* An [`IncomeType:`](#incometype-tag) tag.
* A [`Program:`](#program-tag) tag.
Reports For Various Situations
------------------------------
When data is well formed as specified herein, there are various quick reports
that can be used to verify certain conditions or issues with accounting.
Here are a few examples:
### Verifying That An Invoice Is Paid
Assume for this example that the shell variables `entity`, `program`, and
`invoice` are set as follows:
$ entity=Sir-Moneybags; program='Main.*Org:.*Direct'; invoice=2012-05-30
If the invoice was paid, this ledger command will have two lines of output,
and the second line will be a transaction on the payment date. If only one
line appears, it's the receivable accrual and we see the invoice is not paid.
$ ledger -f accounts/books.ledger -V --sort d --limit 'tag("Entity") =~ /'$entity'/ and tag("Program") =~ /'$program'/ and tag("Invoice") =~ /'$invoice'/' reg /Accrued/
Alternatively, the following command will only have output if the invoice is unpaid:
$ ledger -f accounts/books.ledger -V --limit 'tag("Entity") =~ /'$entity'/ and tag("Program") =~ /'$program'/ and tag("Invoice") =~ /'$invoice'/' bal /Accrued/
Analysis of the Data
--------------------
If this methodology is followed, Ledger can be used to analyze the financial
data for the organization.
### Testing Program Success
If you use the [`Program`](#program-tag) tag effectively, you can easily test
the successes of various fundraising programs with a command like this:
$ ledger -f accounts/books.ledger --pivot Program bal '/^Income/'
Meanwhile, using the [`Program`](#program-tag) tag for Expenses can help
track what programs are costing with commands like these:
$ ledger -f accounts/books.ledger --group-by 'tag("Program")' reg '/^Expenses/'
FIXME: example output
### Checking Integrity of a Tag
[As mentioned](#entity-tag), the `Entity:` tag is one example among many
where the value is a wide range, but since Ledger CLI isn't backed by a more
complete ERP system, it's possible during data entry for typos to make a
serious problem. One work around to this flaw is to periodically run a
command like:
$ ledger -f accounts/books.ledger -F '%(tag("Entity"))\n' reg|sort|uniq|less
which will show all unique `Entity:` values currently in use.
Copyright and License of This File
----------------------------------
This specific document, the README.md file for npo-ledger-cli, is copyrighted:
Copyright © 2013, Bradley M. Kuhn
This document's license gives you freedom; you can copy, modify, convey,
propagate, and/or redistribute this software under the terms of either:
* The GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
Foundation, Inc.; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option)
any later version (aka GPLv3-or-later).
* *or* the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States
license, as published by Creative Commons, Inc. (aka CC-By-SA-USA-3.0)