date check request

Blair Lowe gnucash at zedemail.ca
Tue Feb 22 19:32:13 EST 2005


On Tue, 2005-02-22 at 17:20, Derek Atkins wrote:
> What does it mean to be "in range"?  Gnucash currently has no concept of periods
> so right now this makes no sense in the gnucash context.
> 
> -derek
> 
> Quoting Blair Lowe <gnucash at zedemail.ca>:
> 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > It would be nice if gnucash had a preference that checks to see that the
> > bill, invoice, or payment dates that you are entering fall within a
> > specific period.
> > 
> > It is so common for a user to enter the wrong year, and a warning
> > message (if the preference is activated) would be great to reduce out of
> > range errors.
> > 
> > This becomes crucial when more than one year is in the books.
> > 
> > Blair. 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > gnucash-devel mailing list
> > gnucash-devel at gnucash.org
> > https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
> > 

"In Range" would be the current fiscal being worked on.

For example, we are finishing the books for the year starting on Feb
1st, 2004 to Jan 31st, 2005. We never want to enter any transactions
that are out of that date range or it is most likely an error.

Sometimes after the books are done, we may want to violate that rule,
and change some transaction from the previous year, for example, if our
accountant has found an error in the books for a particular previous
year.

We may, as well, for example, want to enter an invoice for the new
fiscal year, but not report it in the old fiscal year. I may want to
invoice client X on February 5th, 2005, but we are working on the Feb
2004 to Jan 2005 period, so we would remove the preference to add the
invoice, then re-add the preference when we are getting back to last
year's books.

That is our year range. In Canada, this is sometimes less than a year
when a company starts up, but has a year end that is less than a year
away, or when we want to change a year end to a different date, the
fiscal year could be a few days to several months.

Other accounting packages have this date sensitivity preference, and it
is extremely good at eliminating date related data entry errors.

TAFN,
Blair.



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