Irritating

[Derek Atkins]

Terry Boldt <tboldt at attglobal.net> writes:

> > Note that reconciliation is supposed to be for PRINTED,
> > end-of-the-month statements.  It is _NOT_ supposed to be a "this is
> > what the bank says today" process.  If you're just looking at your
> > list of transactions from your financial institution, you're obtaining
> > the list of cleared transactions.  That is NOT reconciliation.  If you
> > want to mark the transactions that have cleared your finanacial
> > institution, you should 'clear' the transactions in the register
> > window by clicking on the RECN column and change the 'n' to a 'c'.
> 
> I'll consider myself strictly repimanded for not following strict gnucash or 
> accounting practices. Meanwhile I will continue do that which I find most 
> sensible, as I am sure most consumers who are non-accountants will do, i.e., 
> follow that methodology which best suits their way of doing things. I have 
> found the humans are good at that and really, really resist having to change 
> their habits or practices to follow that of some s/w written by somebody that 
> knows very little about their lifestyle.
> 
> Yes, the financial institutions are very fond of saying that the online 
> information "may not be" the same as the printed end-of-month statements.
> 
> Meanwhile they are trying hard to get me to accept e-statements and forego the 
> printed monthly statements. That leads me to believe they really and truely 
> consider the online information as accurate as their printed statements 
> (which by the way are derived from the same database as the online 
> information (or a daily replication thereof, or more likely, judging by how 
> fast ATM transactions get posted online, hourly replication)). 

Yes, they are trying to get e-statements accepted, but e-statements
are STILL only created once a month.

> If, however, I follow my (more sensible to me) practice of checking the 
> account information online every 1, 2 or 3 days, I then have 2, 4 or 6 
> transactions through which I will usually have to track down the entry error.

Right, this is why you can/should check your cleared transactions in the
register as you go.

> At one time I used your practice of "checking off" the transactions and 
> reconciling later. Again, this lead to double the work with no benefit. 
> Changed the process and gave me more work - not what I consider the ideal 
> argument for using a computer in the first place.

Well, I dont remember what 1.6 does (I haven't used it in about 2 years
and I don't even have a compiled version installed anywhere I can get
to), but when you reconcile an account in 1.8, it will "pre-reconcile"
your cleared transactions.  This means it does NOT double your work.
Indeed, if you're clearing all your transactions every couple days,
then at the end of the month all you need to do is compare the balance
on your end-of-month e-statement.

Assuming you cleared all your transactions through the register, then
when you run the reconcile process and enter the end-of-month balance,
the reconcile window should show you a difference of '0', which means
you can "finish" the process immediately.  The only extra work you would
need to do is find extra transactions that you missed (which are easy to
find -- scroll and look for the unmarked entries) -- or in the worst case
you'll need to find a marked transaction that shouldn't be marked.

However, if you are actually correcting txns as you clear them and you
do clear everything ahead of time, the reconcile operation should be
a quick no-op (specifically because transactions cleared through the
register are auto-marked for reconciliation).

> No, I will continue my process of reconciling every 3 or 4 days and consider 
> myself duly and truely reprimanded for my truely horrible non-accountant and 
> non-gnucash ways.

Well, that's your prerogative.  We can't keep you from shooting
yourself in the foot, or doing things the "wrong" way.  If it works
for you, that's fine.  But don't complain that there are artifacts of
your incorrect usage.

> I'l still wish that gnucash would stop trying to impose somebody else's view 
> of the world on me and just accept my own view and use the current date as 
> the default date in the reconcile dialog. Hint - maybe you could make this a 
> choice in one of the "preference" tabs.

I can wish that someone hire me as a consultant to work on GnuCash,
but you know, the world doesn't always give us what we want. :)

In general, preferences are bad.  The fact remains that there is
already a way to do what you want; the fact you don't like it is
reegrettable.

[snip]
> > This has been fixed; it should complete the most recent transaction
> > that matches the description.
> 
> By "should" I take it to mean that it "does". Right?

Well, it seems to work fine for me.  Can I guarantee that there isn't
still a bug in there?  No.  Hense the "should" -- meaning that it
should work right now (and it did the last couple of times I used it).

> > I do not believe that you cannot turn off autocompletion.
> 
> The double negative means that I can - yes??? 

Sorry, typo.  "I do not believe that you can turn off autocompletion"

> How? any hints would be appreciated.

[snip]
> > > Another question, does anybody have experience in compiling the latest
> > > stable version under RH 8.0 and which libraries/packages need to be
> > > updated? If so, please update the mailing list so that I can attempt the
> > > update.
> >
> > Um, there are pre-compiled RPMs already available for RH8.  You can
> > find them at http://www.gnucash.org/pub/ As I implied earlier, you
> > will need not only the Gnucash RPM but also an updated g-wrap RPM.
> > Make sure you pull down the RH8 RPMs.
> 
> I had to stop using RPMs. RPM on my system is really badly broken - it 
> considers its own database corrupted in some manner. All attempts by both 
> myself and the vendor's experts have failed to "uncorrupt" or rebuild the 
> database. Even before this I have found RPM to be a rather "fragile" system 
> for upgrading application s/w.

I dont know many people who have built it from scratch on RH8 -- most
people have used the RPMs.  But the fact that the RPMs exists means
that it's possible.  But frankly you're on your own if you're
unwilling to use our shipped binaries.  However, as I said before: if
you built 1.6 then you can build 1.8; the only thing you need to do is
upgrade g-wrap.

> Thanks for a really good accounting package. What I say here is not meant as 
> criticism - just my way of feedback to improve gnucash.

Yep.

-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 at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available