Following up from last week’s blog, the question is: How could you use hledger to track a membership plan to see if you are breaking even on the cost of the plan as compared to your savings?
Here is one way to tackle the problem. This approach is similar to an example I remember from the early days of personal computers. Here’s the story as best I remember it after several decades.
A family-run farm bought one of the early PCs and wondered if they could use it to measure how profitable their pig raising was. The software they were using was an accounting program. They decided to use the accounting program to “charge” each pig anytime that they spent money on it. When they paid for a baby pig, they charged its account. Every time they fed the animal, the cost went on its tab. The same for vaccinations or other medical expenses.
Finally, when they sold the pig, they credited its account with sale price. If the pig left the farm “owing” money, they considered that they lost money on that animal. On the other hand, if the sale more than wiped out the animal’s “debt,” they made a profit.
Turning back to membership plans and hledger, it occurred to me that you could do something similar. My first idea was that the cost of the membership plan could be treated as a loan to the store in question. Any calculated savings would be applied as a repayment of the loan.
Or perhaps there is a way to do something closer to what the farm did above.
My plan, over the next week, is to create some actual hledger transactions showing how this could work. Stay tuned for part 3 next week!