New to PTA, and a few weeks into hledger (1.52). I have a setup that mostly works, but one problem I can't solve cleanly.
My wife and I each get a fixed monthly allowance to spend however we see fit. Mostly small things like coffee and books, occasionally something larger like a camera. Unspent amounts roll forward rather than resetting. We each keep a simple single-entry tracker on our phones that captures the spend accurately, and we do not want to add work beyond that. There is really no cash we need to account for, and for larger purchases (for example, a camera) from the allowances, it still makes sense to give those normal transaction lines on the main journal.
What I need:
We need to track how much each of have left, monthly, with carry-over. This helps with some simple cash flow management.
Individual transactions never go into the main journal, and never have to be identified during reconciliation. Keeping a $5 coffee out of the system entirely is the point.
The allowance is one pool but the spending comes out of several accounts — joint checking plus several cards. Decoupling the entitlement from the payment mechanism is what makes allowances work for us, so I do not want to solve this by giving each of us a dedicated and exclusive card.
The journal has to balance properly when the month's spend goes in as a single amount per person. We do want to run the household budget beyond personal spending rigorously.
Already considered and rejected:
A dedicated card or subaccount per person. Solves it, but breaks the decoupling above, which we actually want.
Balanced virtual postings in brackets. Tracks the entitlement fine, but sits outside the accounting equation, so my real accounts still will not reconcile against statements.
Tagging allowance transactions at reconciliation time. This is precisely the work I am trying to avoid.
Is there a standard pattern here? I suspect I am missing something obvious about how to model an entitlement that is not tied to any particular funding account.
Thank you for both the welcome and the link. I am looking for a true PTA system, so the flat db is a deal-breaker. I think have a working solution that uses equity accounts to capture the variance that will come from simple allowance inputs. I can live with some variance here (say 1% of cash-flow). No one will ever audit these books, so some fuzz on the margins is ok. I am happy to share my approach after a shakeout cruise, but wanted to see if I was missing some standard and proven patterns before I set off on my own.
Gotcha. Dexter is really interesting and there are real parallels to what I am trying to do. What is different in Dexter's budgeting approach is that it assumes that "every dollar has a job", so there needs to be many envelopes that cover all the jobs. What I want is a carve out. One monthly amount, that can rollover, for my wife and myself that doesn't need the same level of accounting. Thanks for the pointer. And I agree with the post you linked to; those really are well done docs.
@tlrand YNAB has the concept of Ready to Assign (RTA), which is a single number representing what cash you have available to spend. Surebeans is an hledger frontend I make that calculates an RTA value in the Plan tab.
Surebeans like YNAB also does the envelope system. It calls them categories. You can ignore that by not categorizing any transactions.
@Doug thanks for the link. From what I can tell from the docs this is a straight-forward envelope system that still requires all transactions/records to be entered and assigned to an envelope/category. If that is the case, it doesn't meet my needs. For our allowances, we keep simple ledgers that we reconcile monthly. If this money was from an old-fashioned case envelope or we had dedicated cards, this would be trivial. But we want something that easy that also supports each of spending from various assets and liability accounts.
You said 15 days ago "I think have a working solution". How is that going for you?
In Surebeans as with YNAB, the choice to assign categories is optional. It sounds like you want a budget with just two categories, one for your spending and one for your wife's. My wife and I do similar. Each of us has a category group with our name and then categories under that:
The solution did work as a component, but it made the whole system unwieldily. Essentially, I used an equity account that was funded monthly and was used to eat up the untracked transactions. It was easy to track the variance vs our personal ledgers, and as long as it was small enough it was fine. After trying to finish a month this way, I realized that csv imports changed my fundamental assumptions about tracking, so allowance is now tracked in an envelope style. We do budget beyond that, but this was the only area that really was an entitlement rather than more of a run-of-the mill budget goal.
So my learning for others, is to go with the grain of the system, and unless you really have a dedicated card or the equivalent, that allowance tracking will require getting the transactions into the ledger.
