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;doc:journal:transactions: explain transaction balancing (#2135)

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Simon Michael 2024-02-29 14:52:52 -10:00
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@ -1631,6 +1631,34 @@ except they may contain [tags](#tags), which are not ignored.
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## Transaction balancing
How exactly does hledger decide when a transaction is balanced ?
The general goal is that if you look at the journal entry and calculate the amounts'
sum perfectly with pencil and paper, hledger should agree with you.
Real world transactions, especially for investments or cryptocurrencies,
often involve imprecise costs, complex decimals, and/or infinitely-recurring decimals,
which are difficult or inconvenient to handle on a computer.
So to be a practical accounting system, hledger allows some imprecision when checking transaction balancedness.
The question is, how much imprecision should be allowed ?
hledger currently decides it based on the commodity display precisions inferred or declared for each commodity:
if the postings' sum would appear to be zero when displayed with the standard display precisions, the transaction is considered balanced.
Or equivalently: if the journal entry is displayed with amounts rounded to the
standard display precisions (with `hledger print --round=hard`), and a human with
pencil and paper would agree that those displayed amounts add up to zero,
the transaction is considered balanced.
This has some advantages: it is general, usually intuitive, and configurable when needed.
It means that transaction balancedness is somewhat dependent on commodity display precisions,
so eg when using `-c/--commodity-style` to display things with more than usual precision,
you could notice some of your journal entries need to adjusted (made more precise).
Other PTA tools (Ledger, Beancount..) have their own ways of doing it.
Possible improvements are discussed at [#1964](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/issues/1964).
## Tags
<!-- same section name as Commands > tags, if reordering these update all #tags[-1] links -->