Introducing myself

Mark Carter mcturra2000 at yahoo.co.uk
Thu Jan 3 06:50:08 EST 2008


Hi guys, I just joined the gnucash devel mailing list, and I thought I'd introduce myself and explain my interest in GnuCash.

When I was on Windows, I used to use Microsoft Money 2004, and it served my purposes. Last year I bought an iMac, and switched to Ubuntu (I prefer it over OS X). MS Money doesn't work on Linux, of course, and I wasn't impressed with GnuCash, so I wrote my own little finance package using Python. It was about 800 lines long, and did what I needed. Late last year I discovered virtualisation, so I used MS Money on Ubuntu. Then some configuration setting went wrong, and I couldn't connect Windows to the internet, and get share price updates.

Now that the new year has started, I needed to tweak my Python program, and start to do some re-architecting. After playing around for a bit, and wondering what the point might be, I decided to give GnuCash another go.

My interest lies primarily in the advanced portfolio, and I've got some personal itches to scratch. The module alone is about the size of my entire python finance package, so the prospect of dipping into somethign completely new is fairly daunting. I noticed that someone is already working on the advanced portfolio, although not in the areas that currently interest me. 

The sort of things that I have in mind for enhancement are:
* showing the perfomance of mutual funds and share protfolio separately, and in aggregate
* showing the performance against a market index
* I'd really like to see performance based on the current year, rather than on a cost basis. I submitted an RFE comment to this effect in December - although I have a workaround: I rebased everything at 31 December. Not pretty, but it works.
* Maybe have an export facility, so that the report can be exported as a s-expr (rather than a complicated html) for further processing. I can imagine that being seen in a dim light, though.


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