[Beginner question] Help needed for a French chart of account

General
1

Hi all,

I’m new at PTA and I'd like to use hledger for a bakery in France.

I'm struggling to find a nice way to map the legal French chart of accounts to hledger categories (assets, equity, liabilities, income, expenses,).

The French coa is divided into 8 classes, grouped into two categories: balance sheet accounts (Classes 1–5), which include equity, assets, and liabilities, and profit and loss accounts (Classes 6–7), which include expenses and income.

For the "101 Capital" account (Class 1) I would write:

account equity:101 
   alias capital

How would you do this?

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2

Welcome @franckla. That's a nice link.

Maybe start from https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/2b15846636c239627b77705ed9745234b5b0c833/examples/i18n/fr.journal:

; Types de compte de premier niveau. Les sous-comptes en hériteront.
; (traduction automatique)
account actifs                       ; type:A
account actifs:banque                ; type:C
account actifs:espèces               ; type:C
account passifs                      ; type:L
account capitaux propres             ; type:E
account capitaux propres:conversion  ; type:V
account revenus                      ; type:R
account dépenses                     ; type:X

The type tags help standard reports like bs/is to work.

(That is, if you plan to use french account names ?)

You could follow that COA exactly, using french or english names, numbers, or a combination. Whenever the bs/is/cf reports don't show the desired accounts (or hledger accounts --types looks wrong), add a few type tags on high-level accounts to help it.

3

Thanks for the help Simon.

So I guess I could have

account 1:0:1                  ; type:E
  alias 101
  alias capital

1st alias for accountants, 2nd for non accountants, in french

In that case, would the alias prevent child accounts from inheriting the account type of their parents?

4

I never tried to work with such purely numeric account names myself; it certainly deserves some experimentation. Another possibility would be combined numbers and names, like 101-capital.

You would need to write that more like so (the alias subdirective isn't supported yet, and you might as well declare the account type at top level):

account 1      ; type:E

account 1:0:1
alias 101=1:0:1
alias capital=1:0:1

(Someone should write a script to generate these from https://www.plancomptable.com/en/french-chart-of-accounts.htm)

account aliases bring more flexibility but also more complexity and potential for confusion, so see what works for you.

(Re your question, Aliases and account types has some things to say.)

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5

Thanks again Simon your last example really helped

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