Introducing myself

[mark carter]

Christian Bjerre Nielsen wrote:
> 1. Take a look at this bug 501497 min Nor All GnuCash UNCO Values in
> Gnucash reports are hard to import in spreadsheets. My
> comments/requirements may be what you're looking for.
>   
Thanks - and it's interesting food for thought.


I've been reading around that GnuCash was in its death throes (the posts 
are probably a couple of years old) - although I see that it actually 
quite an active project. Must have gotten a kick-start somewhere along 
the line!

I just heard of a project called KMyMoney - and had a quick play with 
it. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem extensible like GnuCash is; although 
GnuCash certainly seems to have accreted code. KMyMoney does look like 
it works out the gains for the period, so looks fairly limited from my 
view-point.

I got an email from Andrew earlier, expressing his dissatisfaction with 
the current state of the advanced portfolio report. Having read bug 
501497, I have thought that a good way to proceed would be if 
transactions could be exported in tab-delimited format. I think there is 
another bug report that suggested exporting in gnumeric format.

Here are my thoughts:
* I personally am not all that interested in gnumeric (although I am not 
completely indifferent)
* Why would we favour gnumeric or the OpenOffice format?
* It seems that we are swapping one horrendously complicated XML format 
(used by GnuCash) for another horrendously complicated format (like 
gnumeric)
* DSV (delimiter-separated values, e.g. by a tab) is much easier to 
process. You can import it into all spreadsheets, plus you can process 
it using your favourite scripting language (in  my case  it's python, 
although I hear some people prefer perl ;) )
* Bug 501497 raises the philosophical question as to whether reports or 
transaction should be exported. My gut reaction would be to say that it 
is the reports themselves that should be exported. However, in the 
particular case that I'm talking about (portfolios), I might prefer to 
take the transactions, and work out my own reports from them.

I, myself, might be quite interested in trying to put together some 
functionality that exported share transactions in DSV format. It would 
be independent work of Andrew.

As an aside, the way I calculated return was as an IRR (i.e. taking 
cashflows, and using current share price as a sales value for any shares 
that remain). I didn't make a distinction between realised and 
unrealised gain. However, it was a statistic that was quite useful to me 
- because it represented a "true" compound rate of return (although 
there are some philosophical objections to it), and I could guage how I 
was doing against a market index.

After having a quick look, there doesn't appear to be a good way of 
using gnucash from the command line. Guile is ideally placed for people 
who want to mess around with GnuCash programmatically via guile scripts 
- but unfortunately, guile looks to be embedded within GnuCash, and 
there's no simple of way of getting at the innards from the outside. 
Unless someone knows differently, and can put me straight, of course ;) 
I admit that I'm a n00b to GnuCash.
> 2. with respect to performance, then this is not a trival matter. What
> do you expect - no to mention what type of performance?
>
> What's the number of your RFE?
>   
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=505415
which has been marked as a duplicate of
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=312049
My bad.