account for 2012-06

[chadwhitacre]

Punchlist

• script a balance sheet
• script an income statement
• DRY them up
• deploy a reconciliation dashboard for Gratipay—add a reconciliation dashboard gratipay.com#3899
• account for the 1.50 payout that the dashboard will surface
• write documentation
• configure testing

[chadwhitacre]

$ ledger -f 2012/06.dat balance
            $ 226.78  Assets
            $ 143.40    Escrow
             $ 47.03      New Alliance
             $ 96.37      Stripe
            $ -25.20    Fee Buffer
            $ 108.58    Operations:New Alliance
           $ -102.45  Equity:Opening Balance
             $ -3.66  Error:Samurai
             $ 52.70  Expenses:Processing Fees
            $ -29.97  Income
             $ -5.91    IHasAMoney.com
             $ -0.54    Miscellaneous
            $ -23.52    Processing Fees
           $ -143.40  Liabilities:Escrow
--------------------
                   0

Things to note:

• Assets:Escrow and Liabilities:Escrow balance.
• Escrow and operations are mixed together within the same accounts, chiefly at New Alliance, but also as regards Samurai (where we used the same account to process IHasAMoney.com payments as well Gittip payments) and even Stripe (there's a test transaction which doesn't result in escrow).
• Therefore, the ending balance for New Alliance, as reflected on the paper statement that @kaguillera and I have in front of us, is equal to Assets - Stripe (130.41).
• The 96.37 left in Stripe at the end of the month is what we would expect them to disburse to us early in the next month (spoiler: they do!).
• Errors:Samurai is how we accounted for this mess.

[chadwhitacre]

Question: do we want to zero out Fee Buffer from Operations on a monthly basis?

[chadwhitacre]

Things to note:

• Also, crucially, the Escrow number also reconciles with the Gratipay database.

[chadwhitacre]

Oh! Except for the 1.50 payout, we need to account for that still.

[chadwhitacre]

Alright! Progress, will return to this later ...

[chadwhitacre]

Let's reformat the journal entries to be in standard format, with debits first, and credits indented.

[chadwhitacre]

Also: A balance sheet has three headings: Assets, Liabilities, and Equity (in that order). Revenue and Expenses don't show up on a balance sheet. Well, they do, primarily under Retained Earnings.

[chadwhitacre]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_balance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_sheet

and especially

http://www.keynotesupport.com/accounting/accounting-basics-debits-credits.shtml

[chadwhitacre]

"Because Asset and Expense accounts maintain positive balances, they are positive, or debit accounts."

and

"Liability, Equity, and Revenue accounts usually receive credits, so they maintain negative balances."

[chadwhitacre]

In other words, we've got the signs right:

[chadwhitacre]

The positive retained earnings means that we lost money during our first month.

The negative processing fee buffer means that we lost money because we were charged way more than we expected.

[chadwhitacre]

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/connecting-the-income-statement-and-balance-sheet.html

[chadwhitacre]

Let's reformat the journal entries to be in standard format, with debits first, and credits indented.

We are already listing debits first. Credits don't need to be indented because they are signed instead (non-standard, but okay).

[chadwhitacre]

Got it! Income statement:

[chadwhitacre]

Hey @zacchiro, I think I figured out how to get an income statement out of ledger. First, I added an Equity:Retained Earnings account to link the income statement to the balance sheet. I used a payee of "Retained Earnings" for the offsetting transactions. Then I ran ledger balance Income Expense but filtering out payee of "Retained Earnings" (when included, the offsetting transactions resulted in an empty report). This gives me a nice income statement that syncs up with retained earnings in the balance statement. Voila! :-)

[chadwhitacre]

[chadwhitacre]

Okay! So it looks like ledger will probably work on Mac OS ... we just need to figure out how to install the version we want, or upgrade locally to the latest ledger.

[chadwhitacre]

I've cleaned up my local brew environment and am installing the latest ledger.

[chadwhitacre]

Alright, looks like this is more than just a version incompatibility:

  ansify_if(justify(scrub(display_total), 20, (20 + int(prepend_width)), true, color), (should_bold ? (bold : null)))
While calling function 'int ':
While calling function 'justify ($ 46.66, 20, <#EXPR ({20} + int(prepend_width))>, 1, 0)':
While calling function 'ansify_if (<#EXPR justify(scrub(display_total), {20}, ({20} + int(prepend_width)), true, color)>, )':
Error: bad lexical cast: source type value could not be interpreted as target

Maybe shendurelab/MIPGEN#3 is a clue?

[chadwhitacre]

Yay! Tests pass! 💃

[chadwhitacre]

@kaguillera This is ready for final review and merge!

[chadwhitacre]

!m @kaguillera 💃