Types of reports required

[Richard Wackerbarth]

On Mon, 17 Jul 2000, Jason Rennie wrote:
> rkw@dataplex.net said:
> > I believe that, although useful, your proposal can be accomplished by
> > a more general mechanism. "Taxability" is just one 'trait' that you
> > may want to assign to an account. By having a generalized system of
> > assigning 'traits' to accounts, the user can form a report by
> > selecting on the basis of those 'traits'. Taxability is certainly one
> > 'trait' that will get used frequently. 
> 
> Sounds like a good feature to add to the engine. :)
We're working on it already.

> rkw@dataplex.net said:
> > I think we MUST allow the user to explicitly specify which shares ...

> Yup.  I'll agree with you there.  Having some relatively simple defaults 
> (e.g. FIFO, average basis) would be nice for those who don't care to 
> squeeze every penny out of their taxes.
And I agree with you on that point also.

> rkw@dataplex.net said:
> > Even that is not good enough. In a multi-user system, each user will
> > want their own per account style. 
> 
> Is GNUCash multi-user?  
At the moment, it is not. However, that is one of the requirements for some of
the future extensions which have been discussed. Therefore, I think that we
should consider it a required compatability issue for new mechanisms being
designed. It is rather foolish to ignore future requirements that you can
anticipate. Often, by proper design, you can have an implementation that is not
more difficult to implement and is already prepared to work with the changes
that the new requirement necessitates.

> Won't different users store their accounts in 
> different directories and hence separate styles in that way?  I guess a 
> business setting is a place where many people may use and update the same 
> account. 

Yup, among others.

> Does GNUCash have facilities for distinguishing between 
> different users?  If so, we'll probably want to have some sort of hash 
> table of properties with the user name as a part of each proptery name 
> (i.e. "jrennie.register-style=auto-single"). 
1) The style needs to be "per account" (perhaps obtained by default)
2)  It is unclear that this store should be handled by the common data engine
rather than be taken from the local environment wherein it is not necessary to
reference the particular user.