Inventory and payroll

[Conrad Canterford]

OK, here are my thoughts on why we keep an inventory of shares in
Gnucash. Please remember that I am not an accountant, so it is entorely
possible I'm completely off track.

1. The value of an asset must be revalued occassionally to determine
their value as assets, and as Philip points out, this is best done by
multiplying the current share price by the number of shares held.
2. Strictly speaking, this is not a part of the account recording
function. The revaluation or devaluation of any asset should be recorded
in the accounts, but is effectively an external activity, and only the
results form a part of the accounts.
3. For convenience sake, we include this revaluation function in Gnucash
because:
  a. It will satisfy the requirements of a larger set of home users.
  b. It is very simple to automate and still be sufficiently accurate.
  c. It does not require much more information than is already
contained.

None of this makes the Gnucash stock account type suitable for serious
business use.
- The value of the asset is not trivial to calculate.
- The amount of information required to be stored is considerably larger
(and considerably less related to the accounts).
- The level of detail and complexity required (due, if nothing else, to
the extra information and the things needed to be done to it) is several
orders of magnitude more complex.

So,
- the stock account type is a type of inventory.
- it performs its function adequatly (I believe) for simple share
holdings.
- but it does not contain the details required for a full inventory
control system.
Which brings me back to my original point. I think the inventory control
stuff should be a seperate (but fully integrated) application. I might
be able to be convinced that it can be sensibly done as a scheme module,
but it will require some more convincing yet... :-)

Make sense?

Conrad.
-- 
Conrad Canterford (conrad@mail.watersprite.com.au)
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