Test report: Scheduled Transactions

[Derek Atkins]

Richard -Gilligan- Uschold <uschold@cs.ucf.edu> writes:

> We don't need any hidden accounts.
> 
> I have been emulating this functionality for the last year or so.  I have
> three accounts: the loan principle, mortgage escrow, and interest payments.
> The principle is a liability account, the escrow is a bank account, and the
> interest is an expense account.

The reason I said "hidden" accounts is that these three accounts are,
for all intents and purposes, tied together in a single mortgage.  It
really doesn't make sense to be able to separate them, at least in my
mind.

> The recurring payment is simply a split transaction, the total going to each
> of the three accounts, as required.  The only difficult part is determining
> the principal and interest amounts.  The escrow amount changes periodically,
> also, typically once a year.

Agreed.  I'd like to be able to have gnucash determine the principal
and interest amounts for me, so I don't have to.  In particular, I
_always_ pay-down my mortgage.  I don't want to have to think about
the amount of principal/interest for each payment; that's what
computers are for!

> This could be implemented two ways: as a smart loan account that generates
> the recurring transaction or as a smart recurring transaction that knows how
> to compute loan interest.

Hrm, how about a "smart loan account" that get's tied to the escrow
and interest accounts?  In other words, the master loan account, which
would contain the principal computations, has a pointer to an escrow
(bank) account and a pointer to an interest (expense) account (perhaps
as a kvp entry?).  It also contains the P/I/T information to
auto-compute the p/i split (also in a kvp entry?).  Then a scheduled
transaction to the loan account would automatically force a split into
the interest and/or escrow account.

Actually since the escrow payment is quazi-static (changing once a
year), I think that you could just have that as part of the SX; so the
loan account only needs to deal with the p/i split.  In other words, your
mortgage payment SX would be a transaction containing:

	Acct		Deposit		Withdrawal
	Checking:			$1000.00
	Loan:		$755.36
	Escrow:		$244.64

And the "loan" split would automatically "create" a new split, tied to
the transaction:

	Loan:				$175.27
	Interest:	$175.27

So, in the end, the actual transaction you'd get in the end would say:

	Acct		Deposit		Withdrawal
	Checking:			$1000.00
	Loan:		$580.09
	Interest:	$175.27
	Escrow:		$244.64

But I'm not sure how you get one split to automatically create a
second split.

> Of course, the logic should allow for the loan to be an asset, as from the
> banks point of view.

And the interest would be an income...  Yea yea yea.  The logic is
exactly the same, so let's not worry about that right now.

-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