RFC - SX Projection Report ; Patch - SX enable/disable

[Tim Wunder]

On Tuesday 30 January 2007 10:23:48 pm Peter McAlpine wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have found GnuCash to be a very useful tool for tracking my
> personal finances (THANK YOU!), but as others have brought up
> previously (http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Budgets) there has
> historically been mixed success implementing a budgeting feature.
>
> I should be clear right now that it's not my intention to attack the
> work that has gone into the budgeting features that exist in GnuCash
> now, nor do I want to start a large thread about long term plans for
> budgets in GnuCash. I have experimented with the recently added
> budgeting feature and am unable to have it meet my personal needs.
> After some thought I came up with an idea for a feature which would
> present me with the information I need in a way that I (as a
> accounting novice) can easily understand. I have started working on
> this feature already but was encouraged by Josh to post to the -devel
> list before I get too far (and thus this email).
>
> My proposal is merely this: to add an "SX Projection Report"
> Input:
> Any subset of a SX's
> Any subset of accounts
> A starting date (present time or earlier)
> A finish date (any time after the starting date)
>
> Output:
> A [read-only] report (formatted similarly to the register) which
> would show what the selected account(s) would look like if the
> selected SX(s) were applied to them from the start date to the finish.
>
> Example Usage Scenario:
> The user wants to see if she can afford a new car that has payments
> of $500/month, the user will input their regular SX's and add one
> more [disabled (see below)] SX for the $500/month car payments. The
> user could then generate the SX Projection Report and see the impact
> on her accounts out to some arbitrary date.
>
> It's my hope that this feature would meet mine (and hopefully
> other's) budgeting needs in a way that would not commit GnuCash
> development to any particular budgeting philosophy or development
> track. If users aren't interested in the way the report does
> budgeting they can easily just ignore the report altogether.
>
> In order to get up to speed on the GnuCash source, I have taken the
> time to implement (the diff is attached) a feature which would be
> helpful when using this report: the ability to disable/enable SX's.
>
> Motivation:
> I need to input SX's to select when I run SX Projection Reports,  but
> I may not actually want these SX's to show up on the SLR dialog yet.
>
> Implementation:
> I have added an "Enabled" checkbox to the SX Editor dialog (all SX's
> default to being enabled). If the SX is disabled it does not get
> picked up when the SLR runs. The disabled SX's are (will be)
> available when selecting SX's for SX Projection Reports.
>
> I look forward to hearing your feedback regarding the patch and
> feature proposal.
>

Sounds interesting. But what about SX's that have variables? How would those 
be handled by the report? 

Regards, 
Tim

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