Hledger helps with travel

General
1

In this week's blog, I look at

  • Why an item purchased during travel wasn't a travel expense
  • Sorting expenses by amount
  • Upgrading hledger

And I tie them together with a reference to a recent trip.

Read more at https://hledgerfan.com/hledger-and-travel-expenses/.

2

Thanks for your post.

Have you considered keeping all your transactions as you typically would but use tags?

for example, this is how i would record a non-travel transaction:

2025-06-20 Target
    expenses:home:clothing:shirts          $12.99
    expenses:taxes:ca:sales                 $1.12
    assets:bank:checking                  $-14.11

and the only difference if i had purchased it on a travel trip would be to add a tag:

2025-06-20 Target
    expenses:home:clothing:shirts          $12.99 ;sandiego_summer2025:
    expenses:taxes:ca:sales                 $1.12
    assets:bank:checking                  $-14.11

With this, i can see how much (or little) i spent on a trip with a given tag:

$ hledger bal tag:sandiego_2025
         $12.9900000  expenses:home:clothing:shirts
--------------------
         $12.9900000

I tag all expenses related to toe travel/vacation with tags - airfare, taxi, clothing, food, tips, lodging, fuel, etc.

With a generic travel category, how do you determine how much you spent on your San Diego trip vs. Santa Barbara trip?

info on tags:

3

Actually I should tag the account, so that it will get everything and not just the category:

2025-06-20 Target ;sandiego_2025:
    expenses:home:clothing:shirts          $12.99
    expenses:taxes:ca:sales                 $1.12
    assets:bank:checking                  $-14.11

$ hledger bal tag:sandiego_2025
        $-14.1100000  assets:bank:checking
         $12.9900000  expenses:home:clothing:shirts
          $1.1200000  expenses:taxes:ca:sales
--------------------
                   0
4

Yes, tags can be a great help. I used to combine tags with a travel category. That is, any travel would be under my travel category. Then, there would be a tag to identify the individual trip.

This worked well, except that I found that I wasn't using the information about individual trips. That is, I wasn't running reports to see how much an individual trip cost. So, I stopped adding tags to denote the specific trip.

However, I can easily imagine situations where someone would find identifying separate trips quite useful!