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

[Peter McAlpine]

My intention is to let the existing SX infrastructure do as much of  
the work as possible. As such I would simply let it handle the  
variables in SX's as the SLR would usually handle them.

-Peter

On 30-Jan-07, at 11:13 PM, Tim Wunder wrote:

> 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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