Advice and suggestions for the upcoming end-of-year closing needed

General
1

Hi all,

I am about to finish my second year PTA’ing at the end of the year. :blush:

And this year, I would like to close this year’s (and maybe the 2024’s) ledger and start the new year with an opening balance. As I only ledger my family expenses for my personal enjoyment, I hadn’t the need to close/open any books.

Now I am looking for some advice on a few topics, I am not sure how to handle them properly.

  1. I track multiple commodities.

Part of our savings go monthly into an ETF, which I track as their own commodity, let’s say ETF1 and ETF2:

2025-08-07 ETF1 - Savings
    Asset:Savings:Bank                  -200,00 €
    Asset:Savings:ETF:ETF1                 1,5 ETF1 @@ 200,00 €

2025-09-07 ETF2 - Savings
    Asset:Savings:Bank                  -200,00 €
    Asset:Savings:ETF:ETF2                 2,5 ETF2 @@ 200,00 €

On top, I also (experimentally) track how many liter of fuel I buy over the year:

2025-09-08 Fuel
    Asset:Giro:Bank                         -72,00 €
    Asset:Mobility:Car:Fuel             45,31 l @@ 72,00 €

The fuel scenario is kind of easy, because I can assume, that (more or less) all is gone by the end of the year. So I would just ignore that part?!

But how/what do I do about the ETF savings?

For my monthly reports (that’s what I am interested in the most) I use the -B/--cost -flag, so I can more or less ignore the commodities. At the moment I only track it in such detail for future-me.

I don’t have a full/clear picture what closing/opening has to do with them. Currently, I don’t track the market price (i. e. P directive), and I am not so interested in value reports, atm. Do I need those for closing/opening?

  1. I collect money from the families of my childs Kindergarten group, that is spent over the year e. g. for presents for the kindergarten teachers (form August to August).

My idea is to track these incomes as liabilities. And everything I pay for, reduces the liability:

2025-08-29 Family A
    Liability:kindergartengroup          15,00 €
    Income:kindergartengroup            -15,00 €

2025-08-29 Family B
    Liability:kindergartengroup          15,00 €
    Income:kindergartengroup            -15,00 €

2025-09-16 Present Teacher A
    Liability:kindergartengroup        -5,00 €
    Expenses:kindergartengroup:present  5,00 €

Again, I am not sure how to handle this case? The general idea is to have a report end of august next year or anytime in between, that show’s how much money is still left for the kindergartengroup. How can this be handeld?

  1. Do I need an opening balance, to be able to close a ledger?

I have my ledger files setup as yearly files: 2024.ledger, 2025.ledger My reports only run on the ledger of the current year. Do I need an opening balance in 2025 to be able to close it (and have an opening balance for 2026)?

  1. How do you handle tax returns?

My tax returns I received in 2025 belong to my earnings in 2024. Should I / Do you put the accoring transaction into the 2024.ledger-file? This might be preference, but how do you do it for your personal/private accounting?

Looking forward to your advice and suggestions and thanks a lot in advance!

Best

Jonas

2

Congrats on two years of accounting @jonas!

Have a read of https://hledger.org/hledger.html#close and specifically its --clopen operation, and see if it answers some of your questions ?

You don't need to use that command (but it can save a lot of tedious work, and it could work even if you are using Ledger).

You don't need to open in order to close or vice versa. Files aren't linked very strongly in most PTA apps. The main thing is that if you want to load multiple year files at the same time, and each file has its own opening balances transaction, then you'll need a matching closing balances transaction in each preceding file, to keep the running balances accurate.

Since the 2024 tax refund transaction happens in 2025, I record it in the 2025 journal. But I have per-year subaccounts for taxes; so it will post to the 2024 tax account. It means that to see the full history of 2024 taxes you need to load both the 2024 and 2025 files at once.

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3

Thanks, I did just that (and noticed, that I skimmend over the liability mentionings…). Now, that I have seen closing in action, I hope I can handle those cases, when it becomes serious. :slight_smile:

Also for the taxes, I think I’ll do the same. I don’t want to wait that long to be able to “close the books” of a year…

And for multiyear analysis, I’ll give myself one or two years before thinking about them. :smiley:

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