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

[Linas Vepstas]

Hi Derek,

Don't alarm me ...

On Tue, Apr 16, 2002 at 10:35:29AM -0400, Derek Atkins was heard to remark:
> The real problem is that we do not track individual widgets in the
> "stock" accounts.  

Huh??? Sure we do! Or did you mean 'lots'?

> 1) when you close a book, you only need to copy the unsold widgets
> into the new book

?? Well, of course: this is the 'balance' of the account.
And the book-closing code does handle this.

But its not the 'only' thing; you also need the 'age'.

> 3) a business "inventory" solution would fall out as well (because you
> do need to track individual widgets).

The gnucash engine has been designed, from almost the begining, to 
deal with inventory, by counting widgets, not dollars. That's why
there's a price DB.  That functionality has always been in there.

> add information to the "sell a widget" transactions 

*All* gnucash transactions are 'sell widget' transactions, even the
dollar ones, where the widget is a dollar, and the price of the dollar
is 1.00000000 dollars per dollar.

> which point back
> to the lot(s) that were (partially) sold.

What gnucash does *not* do is track lots. Version 1.2 used to, with a
FIFO, but that functionality was lost in 1.4 due to political reasons. 
Some of the developers did not understand the concept, and trashed the
code. :-(

Tracking lots is the 'definition' of A/R and A/P.  You want to be able
to say that this bill is 120 days old, and its balance has been partly
paid off; and this whether or not there are also other bills, of
different ages, to the same company.   This is *identical* to tracking
lots of stock or widgets.  If/when you add A/R and A/P, you will 
defacto have a lot tracking system that is suitable for inventory.

Derek,  
I am somewhat concerned about how you phrased yourself in this note...
Either you don't really understand how the engine really works (and this
surprises me), or, I dunno... your choice of phrasing is funny ...

--linas



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