Budgets and inconsistent handling of account sign reversal.

[Derek Atkins]

Jeff Kletsky <gnucash at allycomm.com> writes:

> Good news?
>
> A budget report using eguile runs in a couple seconds, instead of
> nearly 20 using the HTML-renderer classes.
>
> Bad news?
>
> Looks like budgets, as they exist today, are apparently unaware of the
> sign-ed-ness of accounts and "ignore" the sign-reversed options (None,
> Income & Expense, or Credit Accounts).
>
> This means that, depending on how you set those flags in the UI, you
> may be on-target, or off target by a factor of two (positive budget
> for expenses, but with negative expenses, due to UI settings). I
> haven't assessed the breadth of the changes that it would entail, but,
> in my opinion, having budget values behave consistently with account
> values seems like a reasonable objective.
>
> If I do decide to tackle having the "internal" budget numbers
> consistent with their associated accounts, and the UI representations
> responsive to the sign-reversed accounts settings (both the budget
> entry screen and reports need "fixes" from what I can tell), how does
> GNUCash handle schema and/or data upgrades? Is there a precedent for
> how object representations are updated from one version to the next?
> The "ideal" thing from a user perspective would be that nothing is
> seen, at least for those users that have "Credit Accounts" for their
> selection.

Umm, the sign reversal is purely in the UI, not in the datafile.  At
least that's how it's SUPPOSED to work.

GnuCash does not handle data format schema updates well.  :-(

> Thanks!
>
> Jeff

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available