Test report: Scheduled Transactions

[Derek Atkins]

Josh Sled <jsled@asynchronous.org> writes:

>> Other thoughts, is there a way to configure a fixed loan, such as a
>> mortgage or auto loan, so that scheduled transactions are created
>> for the loan? This would be especially neat for those folks who
>> have automated withdrawals done for mortgaes.
>
> Indeed; this can probably be done, though my shallow initial thought
> about it is that it'd be benefited by some "advanced" SX functionality I
> wasn't planning on implementing real soon...  I'll think some more about
> this in the near future.

I think this would best be done by having a "Loan" liability account
that can actually measure current state.  The way I'd envision it is
that you would have a Loan account that is initialized by a principal
balance, interest rate, and term.  The "account" can compute the
monthly payment due (it's a simple calculation).  Next, the SX would
move the automatic payments from your "checking" to the Loan account.
Obviously the Loan account would need to know whether overpayments are
applied to Interest or Principal.  Then there is the question of
escrow payments... :)

Thinking about this, I'm not sure whether this should be done by one
combined "magic" account or a master loan account with three
sub-accounts (principal, interest, escrow).  Any comments on how this
should work?  I think the idea situation would be a master account
with three "hidden" subaccounts, but I don't think it's possible to
create a hidden account.  My reasoning is that I'd like to see, for
example, how much interested I paid over a year, or what my current
principal balance is.

I'd offer to work on this functionality, but I don't have a working
gnucash development environment.  Hopefully that will be fixed in the
next couple of months.  If nobody else does it by the time I've got a
working development platform, I'd be happy to do this myself.
Otherwise I can at least provide verbal/written support if not code :)

-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