Itanimulli

Find unpaid clients with ledger-cli

I recently started using ledger(1) for accounting and managing finances.

One of the main things I wanted to have was to be able to record invoices as they were sent and then later record payments as they were actually paid. You can do this a couple of different ways, the most obvious is to have a different account for each client:

2019/08/03=2019/08/13 Invoice
    Assets:Receivable:ACME Inc                  5000 GBP
    Income:Contracting

2019/08/08=2019/08/15 Invoice
    Assets:Receivable:Oceanic Airlines          8000 USD @ 0.80 GBP
    Income:Contracting

2019/08/13 Invoice Paid
    Assets:Checking                             5000 GBP
    Assets:Receivable:ACME Inc

2019/08/15 Invoice Paid
    Assets:Checking                             4000 USD @ 0.80 GBP
    Assets:Receivable:Oceanic Airlines

And then running a simple balance report (making sure we display only in GBP):

$ ledger -f contracting.ledger bal Receivable -X GBP
            3200 GBP  Assets:Receivable:Oceanic Airlines

This is a good enough solution, but I feel like the balance report becomes overly complex if you have many different clients who are unpaid.

There is an interesting option for grouping transactions by tag and preserving this extra metadata without creating new accounts for every different client. --pivot TAG is used for this, see the example below:

2019/08/03=2019/08/13 Invoice
    ; Client: ACME Inc.
    Assets:Receivable                           5000 GBP
    Income:Contracting

2019/08/08=2019/08/15 Invoice
    ; Client: Oceanic Airlines
    Assets:Receivable                           8000 USD @ 0.80 GBP
    Income:Contracting

2019/08/13 Invoice Paid
    ; Client: ACME Inc.
    Assets:Checking                             5000 GBP
    Assets:Receivable

2019/08/15 Invoice Paid
    ; Client: Oceanic Airlines
    Assets:Checking                             4000 USD @ 0.80 GBP
    Assets:Receivable

And now using the --pivot option:

$ ledger -f contracting.ledger bal Receivable --pivot Client
            3200 GBP  Client:Oceanic Airlines:Assets:Receivable

I prefer the second type for tracking who the invoices were to and who has paid. I think it is also possible to add extra metadata such as the invoice number so you could track down exactly which invoices are still due to be paid, though I haven't looked into this yet.

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