Test report: Scheduled Transactions

[Richard -Gilligan- Uschold]

Derek Atkins wrote:

> 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.
>

I still don't like the word "hidden"  These accounts need to be accessible from
the account tree in the usual ways.
The interest account has to be accessible from the Expenses:Tax Deductible tree
for doing tax reports.
The principal and mortgage escrow have to be in their respective Liabilities or
Assets trees to generate nwt worth reports, etc.
Also, the escrow account needs to be directly accessible to the user to enter the
insurance / real estate taxes expense transaction once a year.

>
> > 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

--

Gilligan            |                    __o           .oooO
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                  /p|\                (_)/ (_)          \ (   Oooo.
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                 ========       gilligan@mpinet.net           (_/
             ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~   uschold@cs.ucf.edu