Book clsoing [was: Re: Addition of HBCI support, Maturity of 1.7-branch, next stable release time frame?

[Linas Vepstas]

On Sat, Apr 13, 2002 at 06:46:48PM -0700, Josh Sled was heard to remark:
> On Thu, Apr 04, 2002 at 06:02:56PM -0600, Linas Vepstas wrote:
> 
> | I think the engine side is 'mostly' done, althought I have *not* handled
> | SX's for book closing.  The big, big hole is to put together a GUI
> | to allow the user to do this.
> 
> Can you illuminate how book closing is going to occur, technically?

src/doc/books.txt  'plan A', I beleive.   I should modify that do to 
indicate what actually got coded.

Very very breifly, 
-- a copy is made of the account tree
-- transactions are moved to the new account tree if they are 
   newer than date 'x' (actually, *any* valid query can be used 
   to partition the transactions into two sets, not necessarily 
   a date query).
-- A balancing transaction is automatically added (between an
   equity account and the current account). The trasnaction is for 
   the balance when the book got closed (so that new books start with
   the right balance).   
-- Lots of kvp data is written out to indicate which new account is a
   copy of which old account, what the closing date was, etc. etc.
   In theory, there is no data loss. 
-- changes to SQL DB & XML backend to support the sorage of multiple
   books.

Most of the 'hard work' in coding this was to update/cleanup how
books and guid's and entities interact, so that I could have multiple
books going at once.  (This is actually an area where I had problems
with sched xactions, since it assumed that there is one unique account
group, when in fact there is one account group per book.)

Remaining work, besides providing a GUI, is to modify searching,
graph generation, reports, etc. so that they can work over multiple
books (or not, user's choice).  I think this is important so that
one could graph, for example, a multi-year trend line from data in
multiple books.  (Never mind being able to run an 'annual report'
even if one closed books monthly.).

Hmm. Actually, I'm not sure how much I tested the XML backend. If at
all.  I think I got hung up trying to figure out a suitable naming
scheme for auto-naming the differrent books.


--linas

> 
> ...jsled
> 
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pub  1024D/01045933 2001-02-01 Linas Vepstas (Labas!) <linas@linas.org>
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