beancount-accruals

Prepare an accrual draft a user can approve — calculated from a stated schedule, never estimated in chat, and never posted without confirmation.

This skill exists because period-end accruals are where agent arithmetic does the most damage: a plausible number, posted once, then posted again on rerun. So the calculation follows the contract in references/schedule-contract.md — read it first — every figure traces to a query or to the schedule's stated basis, and the draft carries a stable identity that makes a rerun reproduce the same draft instead of a second posting.

Prefer bea

Read beancount-init's references/bea-cli.md (from this skill's folder, ../beancount-init/references/bea-cli.md; a copy at references/bea-cli.md when this skill was installed alone) before running ledger commands: it binds the root ledger, the batch write path, and the check gate. Without bea, use beancount-init's references/compatibility.md. Writes go through bea add after confirmation, with decimal strings in batch JSON; bea check must pass before and after.

Scope

Does: for each schedule the user states (or confirms from support they provide), compute recognized-to-date, already-booked, and the required adjustment per the contract, present the balanced draft entries, and — only on an explicit yes — post them through the shared propose/confirm/check flow.

Does not: invent a schedule from a missing recurring payment (absence is not an expense); post, auto-reverse, or schedule anything without the confirmation in this run; give tax or depreciation advice; modify existing entries — surface a wrong booked amount and leave edits to the user. beancount-add appends only: if the user explicitly requests a separate adjusting entry, it can propose one through its own confirmation/check flow, but cannot edit or replace the original entry. Do not bypass the existing-identity stop with another identity for the same schedule and period.

Workflow

1. Establish the schedule

Local ledger files only. For a ledger hosted on Beancount.io, stop this skill and offer a separately requested hosted workflow or local clone (beancount-init's references/bea-cli.md, Hosted ledgers). For each accrual the user wants, pin down the contract's fields: schedule id, expense and balance-sheet accounts (existing accounts only — categories are never invented), basis amount with its support, service interval, day-count convention, and target kind (cumulative or current-period). A policy may rest on an estimate the user approves, with method and source stated on the schedule. When any field is missing, ask; a draft built on an unstated assumption is an estimate wearing a schedule's clothes.

2. Compute and check identity

Resolve the accounting period separately from the as-of cutoff and day-count: monthly identities use YYYY-MM (as of February 1 closes January). Run the contract's queries (accrual-booked, accrual-postings) for recognized expense in that schedule's scope, not its prepaid or liability balance. Before drafting, search the ledger for this run's identity (accrual:<slug>:<period>, carried as the entry's import-id on posting): if a posting with that identity already exists, the period is already drafted — show the existing entry and stop. A rerun must reproduce the identical draft, never a second posting. Externally sourced recognition stays inside the booked evidence, never silently excluded.

3. Present the draft

Per schedule, show: the policy and its support, the interval and day-count, recognized-to-date, already-booked (with the postings list as evidence), and the required adjustment as balanced draft entries — direction in words when the adjustment is negative (a reversal of the usual direction). State the draft's identity. Nothing is written in this step.

4. Confirm, post, verify

Only on an explicit yes to the shown draft: write it through bea add with the identity as import-id, run bea check, and report the result. On no, nothing is written and the draft stays in the conversation. A reversal of a booked accrual is its own draft through the same flow — preparing a schedule never authorizes an automatic reversal later.