In search of an elegant way to track sales taxes, tips, etc

General
1

Hello,

I am experimenting with tracking a good amount of details of my expenses, and so I would like to keep record of amounts like sales taxes and tips I pay. Here is an example of how I currently do it (I'm using ledger-cli):

2024/10/01 Joe's Restaurant
    assets:checking                           -24.15
    expenses:restaurant                        24.15
    expenses:sales taxes                        3.62
    expenses:tip                                3.50
    revenue:sales taxes cancellation           -3.62 
    revenue:tip cancellation                   -3.50

I do it this way because I want the "expenses:restaurant" to reflect all the money I've spent in restaurants, and for me that should include sales taxes and tips. But since I also want to keep track of sales taxes and tips, I include postings for them, and then I add negative equivalent amounts, to balance them out.

I see two related issues with this:

  • If I would show the register of all the expenses, then I would have more expenses that in reality, because taxes and tips would be counted twice (once explicitly, and once included in "expenses:restaurant").

  • Similarly, this add "revenues" to the revenue category that aren't real revenues.

So my question is can you think of a better way to keep track of those expenses?

While writing this message, I though of maybe I could create another top-level account, like "other:", and then use these accounts: "other:sales taxes", "other:sale taxes negative", "other:tip", "other:tip negative"... Is this legible?

2

Welcome @renbus. How about contra (negative) expenses instead of revenues ? And then I imagine you can make reports exclude those if needed.

3

Oh yeah, I didn't think about this, that's simple and it prevents the negative aspects I was mentioning.

Thanks a lot for your quick reply!