gnucash master: A truly ancient bug, discovered with an Xcode-5.1 compiler warning.

John Ralls jralls at ceridwen.us
Tue May 20 20:20:29 EDT 2014


On May 20, 2014, at 4:02 PM, Bob Gustafson <bobgus at rcn.com> wrote:
> No, I am not doing it in GnuCash - but I wish I could.
> 
> My comment is to encourage any effort in the direction of time and timezone support and discourage attempts to close off that path.

I don’t think that that’s a direction we want to go. I can’t see many users making the effort to include the time they wrote a check, or swiped their debit card, or whatever. FWIW, one CC company seems to post everything at 1700. Every transaction looks like
          <STMTTRN>
            <TRNTYPE>DEBIT
            <DTPOSTED>20140121170000.000

Everybody else I use just reports posted dates.

> 
> As an example, here is a box of chocolates complete with timestamps..
> 
> viewspread13.27.csv:12345678	09/23/2013		-40.32		EINZUG AUSLANDSLASTSCHRIFT|9208|CHF      49,50KURS1,2276000|KURS VOM 20.09.13    MAFD|ZUERICH-FL AM19.09.13 15.50|	LINDT ZRH CHXR          CHE| 10010000|	959566027|	EC-POSMAGNET6   GEB.EU 0,00|	002|	

I see two dates and one timestamp. The timestamp may or may not be useful; there’s no way of knowing without detailed information from the bank about what it means. Here’s one guess: You made a purchase for CHF49.50 at 1550 on 19 Sept 2013 in Zurich. It was posted to the seller’s bank on 20 Sept and to your bank at $40.32 on the 23rd. That’s an effective exchange rate of $1.230/CHF.
The rates, according to http://www.exchangerates.org.uk/CHF-USD-exchange-rate-history-full.html,
were

Monday 23 September 2013	1 CHF = 1.0979 USD
Sunday 22 September 2013	1 CHF = 1.0984 USD
Saturday 21 September 2013	1 CHF = 1.0987 USD
Friday 20 September 2013	1 CHF = 1.0987 USD
Thursday 19 September 2013	1 CHF = 1.0979 USD

The actual rate used by the banks could have been any of those, or something else, but the spread is $.0008, or < 4¢ on the transaction out of the $4.25 the bank charged you. Talk about sweating the small stuff. I don’t see how you gain anything at all by knowing you made the purchase — or whatever actually happened — at 1550.

Regards,
John Ralls






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