Re: org-tables with monetary amounts

[Daniele Nicolodi <daniele@grinta.net>]

On 25/09/2020 11:25, Neil Jerram wrote:
> Aside: Perhaps I'm misunderstanding them, but none of the open source
> tools, including (h)ledger, seem to be of much help here.
> - They focus on data entry and reconciliation, which I don't need as I'm
> happy to download and use OFX files from my bank.

I don't think the focus of ledger (or hledger, or beancount) is on data
entry. Actually beancount even has an ingest framework to deal with
importing data from bank statements and other sources.

> - They don't offer anything intelligent and automated for automatically
> categorizing transactions.

For beancount there is smart_importer
https://github.com/beancount/smart_importer and it is not difficult to
hack your own. I indeed use my own tool based on a simple machine
learning algorithm implemented by scikit-learn (Python).

> - They don't have a sophisticated representation of a budget, and
> reporting against that.

I am not sure what you mean by "sophisticated representation of a
budged". Once you categorize expenses in a (hierarchical) set of
expenses accounts it is trivial to use something like beancount to check
the balances against a budget.

> Do you know of a good forum (other than this!) for discussing such points?

The ledger-cli and the beancount mailing lists may be the right places
to discuss the use of these tools.

> I've attached mine, in case you read Scheme and there's more detail in
> there that is of interest.

My use case is very different, thus something external to org-mode is
not really useful.

Maybe an example would clarify what my use case is. I am working on a
research proposal where I need to provide details about funding
allocation in a few different categories over a certain amount of years.
In my document this is an org-table. Right now I have two choices to
edit the table:

- have monetary amounts in the cells (example "123.00 EUR") and do the
match externally,

- do the math in the org-table, specify the right formatting for all
computed cells, and still have to post-process it to add the currency
symbols to the input cells.

Either solution is sub-optimal. It would be nice if org-tables could
support monetary fields as they support time fields.

Cheers,
Dan