Check Printing

[Carl]

A few months ago I said we were going to need to fix or add a few features 
to GnuCash and we are finally getting started on one of them - Check 
printing. This message is to let you all know what we are thinking of and 
to get some feedback and sanity checking.

We need to be able to print business checks which include the address of 
the company we are paying and have two check stubs attached instead of 
multiple checks on a page. I have seen this requested before and I noticed 
a comment by Derek last month that the check printing needs to be 
re-written. While we would like to see check printing re-written to make 
new formats easier, print business checks and print several checks at a 
time, we need the address feature now.

After looking into the code we have two options for adding this check 
format.

1. Using the Payee name, search the list of vendors and employees for a 
match. If found, use that as the address to print on the check. If not 
found, leave the address area blank or bring up a window that allows the 
user to find the correct name, add a new vendor or employee name or print 
the check as is without an address.

2. Change the check register to store a vendor or "payee" id instead of a 
string name so that the we can get the address info without doing a string 
matching search. This would require that anytime you write a check the 
payee must exist or be added as you write the check. This is how QuickBooks 
seems to do it. I know home users will consider this excessive because they 
would need to add their friends and relatives as "vendors". But in practice 
it wouldn't be a big impact. The default behavior when writing a check to 
an "unknown" payee would be a pop up that uses the entered name to search 
the known payees and give a list of possible matches along with an "Add" 
button that would add the name into the list of payees but not require any 
further info. In QB terms this is a "Quick Add". It could be looked at as a 
spell checker for writing checks.

As much as I believe the second option is better we are leaning towards the 
first option because the first option is much more contained in its scope. 
Making changes to the check register and any other function that might 
conceivably generate a check sounds like a large project that could be very 
ugly. The second option may be more appropriate for inclusion in GC version 
2.

What will probably end up happening is we do the minimum part of option one 
needed now (if no match, don't print the address) with a vague plan to go 
back and add the window to select a vendor later.

Carl Schmidtmann
Faultline Software Group, Inc
408.736.9655