Thanks to /u/orcusvoyager1hampig for spelling this out to me on reddit
I go out to dinner with a friend and they offer to pay me back later for their meal. I write this in my ledger:
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This makes sense to me. Today, I sold something for Dave on ebay. I’m going to reduce what he owes me using that part of the payment:
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This does not balance. As a quick fix, I can remove the Income:Ebay -5 USD
and take that from Dave’s debt account directly. However, at the end of the month beancount will report $20 of revenue while ebay’s statement will report the full $25.
Matching these numbers is important to me. What I need to do is:
- Keep a record of Assets:Inventory as an intermediary between Dave’s debt and my other Assets.
- Keep a record of Expenses:COGS (Cost Of Goods Sold) to sink Dave’s transferred inventory into once sold.
Note the additional transaction here:
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For future debts I will need to determine the price of our asset transaction ($5) after the item is sold.
Quick dose of nostalgia, when googling beancount COGS
, a wiki for Toontown is the first result. Fun times.