sql & gnucash

[Linas Vepstas]

ccing the mailing list ...

On Mon, Jun 25, 2001 at 06:54:11PM -0500, cbbrowne@hex.net was heard to remark:
> 
> One thought would be to try to build an alternative to QIF/OFX/IFF,
> and _DO IT RIGHT_.

Easier said than done.

(actually, IIF doesn't look that bad; just underdocumented).

> Note the recent thread regarding "GNU-POS;" for that, it would be
> greatly beneficial to have some sort of data interchange scheme that
> would require substantially less human effort than QIF/OFX look to
> require to fill in the blanks.

One posibility is OTP -- open trading protocol.  This was issued
by a small company some 3 years back.  Don't know if its dead or allive.
It seemed to be designed specifically for communicating the transfer of 
'stuff' from one vendor to another, and resumably, money counts as
'stuff'.   Haven't reviewed it in a long time.

> A _good_ idea would be to try to have this "play nicely" with some of
> the other packages out there [e.g. - SQLLedger].

Sigh.  Love to.  The sql-ledger guy seems to be a bit grumpy, and
some of his buddies view gnucash as a competitor rather than a potential
collaborator.    I haven't been able to get an interesting dialog
started.  

> I guess that in effect, what would need happen is to have some sort of
> structured (XML, doubtless) way of representing transactions, and
> have, alongside that, some conventions on how to set up some
> translation tables to indicate where the data should get dropped when
> it goes into GnuCash.

All that gnucash really wants is 'from' and 'to' accounts that are 
somehow uniquely identified (therby making the translation tables
maintainable).  The lack of these unique identifiers hurts.

But in another sense, it *is* a hard problem:  Say vendor A transfers
money from account A to vendor B's account B, and does so monthly.
However, vendor B may want to account for this in a more complex
fashion: 50% of that payment is widgets, 35% is services and 15% 
is tax.  Automating/translating that is 'hard'.  Worse, the percentage
splits may vary month to month...

(viz: OFX may show I wrote a check for $100 to grocery ABC.  But in
fact, for me, it was $50 of groceries, and $50 cash back.  I can't
really fault OFX for failing to know this.)

--linas