ROI discussion

[Bill Gribble]

On Fri, Dec 08, 2000 at 12:04:59PM +1100, Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
> Bill, you wanted some information about ROI calculation.
> 
> All this stuff is all archived in the ML - read the thread starting
> at this URL:
> 
> http://gnucash.org/gnucash-devel/June-2000/msg00409.php3
> 
> This calculations are slightly nontrivial, so sharing them with 
> gnumeric if possible may not be a bad idea.

Robert - we had talked about using the ROI report as a 'test case' for
the complexity needed in the new report system.  However, aside from a
complicated number-crunch, there's really nothing interesting about
the structure of the ROI report.

It's the simplest possible case of a Query (to select the splits
involved in the relevant cash flow), plus an algorithm (which crunches
the splits into an ROI value) and a simple report that amounts to
about a couple of sentences of text and maybe a table to show the
splits in the cash flow.

So I'll say I'm encouraged about the possibility of an
reporting-analysis library of moderate complexity :) I agree that
getting the code for the actual IRR computation is a little bit
tricky, though I'm pretty sure I have coded up a reasonable and simple
library for representing and solving these kinds of equations ... I
think it's in c++ though :( In any case, I'll see if I can find an
implemented version to use.

b.g.