budgeting

[Derek Atkins]

Josh Sled <jsled@asynchronous.org> writes:

> The fact that a transfer of money occured is encoded in one split [Memo:
> Walmart, split's account: checking, split's action: "debit" or "electronic
> debit" or something]; the fact that it was for groceries is encoded in
> the balancing split [memo: "food", account: expense.groceries]... with
> subsequent splits for any finer granularity you want on the line-items
> of the grocery receipt.  Is there really a call for "Walmart" to have
> first-order involvement in the transaction?
> 
> It seems like the goal here is to be able to say "we spent $x at Walmart,
> and $y at S-Mart", which I think can be done with a Transaction report
> [which doesn't seem to exist, yet] which can look at a subset of the
> transactions ... say, those which reference "Walmart"/"S-Mart" in the
> Memo field...

The only problem I have with this approach is that the Memo field is
fairly free-form.  How is the "transaction report" supposed to match
Memo's that say things like:
	Wal Mart
	Walmart
	WalMart
	Wal-Mart
	Wallmart
	...
Obviously these are all the same institution, but could the report
necessarily match them all (let alone mispellings)?

I think having an actual stored payee list might be a better approach.
This way you can be assured that all payees are the same so it becomes
easier to match.  When you enter a transaction/split, you can enter a
payee as well from a pull-down list (or have the option to add to the
payee list first).  This way you always get the same "Wal-Mart" entry
in the payee field.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord@MIT.EDU                        PGP key available