wishlist: speedentry

[Sven Karlsson]

On 9/11/08, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:
> And how does the transaction autofill not help here?

It works great for recurring transactions of the same amount.

>  In your proposal you'd have to remember HOW to create the split --
>  where do you store the 25% amount?  What if you have different
>  percentages going on?

Always the same account for incoming tax and another account for
outgoing tax. There is only one tax rate, but maybe the tax table could
be used for storage and selection, depending on the wanted flexiblility.
If there are different rates (i.e. different rate for services, food,
books, etc),
you could always handle it the regular way.

This would be an entry form for the most common types of transactions
where suitable.

>  if you have the same txns all the time), and once you leave that
>  it will auto-fill in everyting else!  Then all you need to do is
>  edit the amount.
>
>  So... you're typing 3 things:  date, desc, amount.  This seems
>  to be as little work as what you're talking about, and you can
>  do it today in the current interface.

It's a bit more work than that - or maybe there is some simpler way to
operate that I have missed. I just now entered a new invoice:

1. I enter date + num + start typing an old transaction which autofills
2. The invoice number is changed in the decription
3. Debit field is cleared and new amount is entered from account statement
4. Credit field of taxes is cleared and entered by figuring the total
amount * tax percent
5. Credit field of destination account is cleared and entered by
taking total amount - taxes  (this is normally computed by gnucash,
but since this is an autofill there is some leftover amount that is
shown as unbalanced on the row below, hindering auto balancing...)
6. The paper invoice is marked accordingly with date, num, etc.


With the speedentry, it would look like this:
1. Enter date + num + description + amount + destination account
2. Gnucash figures out if its debit or credit, calculates X percent
and puts on correct (1 of 2) tax account and balances the transaction
on the destination account.
3. Figures are put on the paper invoice.

Besides less typing, there is no need to remember which side is debit
or credit, which account is the incoming or outgoing tax (they are
kept in numbers, 2611 and 2641), there is no need to manually
calculate the amount of tax or the net amount after these taxes.

Could such an entry mechanism be done in scheme, or would it require
changes to the C source code base?

Regards