Transfers between your accounts

The Problem

In your primary bank account you’ve happily been classifying transfers to a secondary account as just expenses:other-account.

But you’ve recently started processing the statements from the second account as well so that you can classify those expenses more accurately.

And now the balances of these two accounts are all wrong when the statements of each account deals with money transferred between these two accounts.

In bank1.journal, imported from bank1.csv:

2018/11/09 Transfer from primary account to secondary account
    assets:bank1:primary    $-200
    assets:bank2:secondary

In bank2.journal, imported from bank2.csv:

2018/11/09 Transfer from primary account to secondary account
    assets:bank2:secondary  $200
    assets:bank1:primary

The Solution

As soon as you start importing statements for both accounts you will have to introduce an intermediate account for classification between these two accounts.

I use assets:transfers:*.

And we may have reports looking at these transfers accounts at some point, you should consider using the same names.

The above example then becomes as follows.

In bank1.journal, imported from bank1.csv:

2019-05-18 Transfer from primary account to secondary account
    assets:bank1:primary         $-200
    assets:transfers:bank1bank2

In bank2.journal, imported from bank2.csv:

2019-05-18 Transfer from primary account to secondary account
    assets:bank2:secondary       $200
    assets:transfers:bank1bank2

Any posting to assets:transfers:* indicates an in “in-flight” amount. You would expect the balance of assets:transfers to be zero most of the time. Whenever it isn’t zero it means that you either don’t yet have the other side of the transfer, or that something is wrong in your rules.

You could theoretically just use assets:transfers without any subaccounts, but I found it useful to use subaccounts. Because then the subaccounts can show me where I should look for any missing transfer transaction.

I typically use sorted names as the subaccount (Python code sample):

"assets:transfers:" + "".join(sorted(["bank2", "bank1"]))

External references

This approach is based on what is described in Full-fledged hledger: https://github.com/adept/full-fledged-hledger/wiki/Adding-more-accounts#lets-make-sure-that-transfers-are-not-double-counted

The question was first asked in issue #51.