scheduled transactions

[Joshua Sled]

On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 09:03:49AM -0700, Clark Jones wrote:

| I think you're getting there.  However, I really think that some way should be
| provided for the [ab]user to specify his/her own frequency -- one I can think

Maybe later;  there are many many other issues that need to be addressed
before this... lots of UI stuff... persistant-storage isssues... I'd
rather just support some [perhaps too-small] subset of what people want
and get all that done, then come back and add support for things that
fewer people need...

| of right off hand that someone might want would be "every 90 days" -- again,
| this differs from "quarterly" as it will "drift" 5 or 6 days a year, and can

Yah.... okay.

| easily come up with one that can only be described as a "series of one-time
| events" -- they _can_ be predicted well in advance (often two or three years),
| but vary slightly from year to year as to the exact "when" -- an example of

Okay.

| A point also just dawned on me:  "biweekly" needs a "day, month, year" anchor
| point -- if it starts on 2-Mar-2001, the next will be 16-Mar-2001, the next
| will be 30-Mar-2001, the next will be 13-Apr-2001 (not 2-Apr-2001!).

Noted... and correct.

| think we need to deal with think we have to deal with things like 'first
| Thursday in the month' or 'third Wednesday'", but now that I think of it, I
| happen to have an expense that's liked to "first Thursdays" (though at the
| moment it doesn't find its way into Gnucash) -- I always purchase dinner at a
| certain restaurant where a meeting is held that evening.  (I used to also have
| one that was "Wednesday before first Thursday", which would sometimes fall on
| the last day of the previous month -- but that sort of strangeness is rare
| enough that I'd be willing to have to enter a series of "one-time" events.)

The former should be supported, the latter is a larger notion of "relative"
dates, which I'm thinking will come some-time later... I'll give it some
attention to figure out if putting it off is the right thing, but it is
an important thing.

| One bit of simplification, though:  "daily", "weekly", and "biweekly" can all
| just be special cases of "defined period", with a "period" of 1, 7, and 14,
| respectively.

As with '90 days', too... nice. :)

| And there's one other related tidbit here:  should we have an ending date?

Yes.  That was part of the budgeting stuff, but I forgot to bring it over
to this.  Definitely an ending date.  At some point there may be an issue
of "chaining" multiple sched.xactions, but I think that that is an issue
more related to keeping GnuCash and the user happy about transitioning
between multiple short-term budgets/sched.xaction sets...

| I know, for instance, that I have one monthly bill that is due the 12th of
[deletia]
| signs up for a loan, typically, there will be N payments.)

Yeah.  Seems like the scheduled transaction stuff takes on all the
time-mgmt stuff from the budgeting concepts... which means it needs a
good chunk of work more to be suitable for both.

...jsled