when you're used to quicken's /classes

[Linas Vepstas]

On Thu, Oct 04, 2001 at 01:00:09AM -0400, cbbrowne@cbbrowne.com was heard to remark:
> On 03 Oct 2001 11:22:29 CDT, the world broke into rejoicing as
> Bill Gribble <grib@linuxdevel.com>  said:
> > On Wed, 2001-10-03 at 10:25, Linas Vepstas wrote:
> > > The intent was to handle this with the 'action' field (the second or
> > > third field from the left in the register).  The idea was to be able to 
> > 
> > It had always been my understanding that we would use slots in the KVP
> > structure of the transaction for class-like functionality.  That way,
> > you could have multiple 'class' tags associated with a transaction if
> > necessary.  
> 
> A traditional way of describing this is via the term "cost centre."

Right.

I'll try to add a note somewhere in the code indicating this.

Bill: if its not in KVP, it should be.  If its not, its only because it
was introduced in version gnucash-1.0, before we had that technology. 
Sad that this old, old feature ever got finished ...

Chris:
> Examples of cost centres would be:
> 
> -> Each building, if you're doing property management
> -> Each department in a company
> -> Each manager that has power over their own budget.

Right, but I think there's a home-financing example of this. 
The 'action' field has default menu selection of 'int', 'atm', 
'check', because I wanted to be able to track seperate subtotals 
for interest, ATM machine withdrawls, and check-writes.  This 
default list of values is not particularly meaningful for 
non-bank accounts. 

The default list also includes 'div', 'stcg', 'ltcg', because I wanted
to split out subtotals for mutual funds according to divident,
short-term cap gain and long-term cap gain.

One GUI difficulty/curiosity  is how to represent the fact that there
are different classes of cost-centers that might be applied at one time,
and how to rationally present the user with the appropriate list.  
(i.e. I don't want to show bank account users the 'ltcg' option).
Where should we store these lists of 'appropriate' values in the 
system?  Are they associated with accounts?   What's the right gui for
editing them, for allowing the user to define them?

(The simple answer is to punt, and do only the simplest thing for now.
But I thought I'd mention it ...)


--linas

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