price.date, transaction.post_date and neutral time

[Alen Siljak]

> Sent: Monday, February 12, 2018 at 7:34 PM
> From: "Wm via gnucash-devel" <gnucash-devel at gnucash.org>
> To: gnucash-devel at lists.gnucash.org
> Subject: Re: price.date, transaction.post_date and neutral time
>
> On 12/02/2018 14:27, Alen Siljak wrote:
> >     I am currently separating the Asset Allocation logic into its own
> >     Python package, for direct use (cli) and potential library reuse
> >     between GnuCash Portfolio and an Android app (perhaps an add-on for
> >     MoneyManagerEx or who knows where it leads).
> 
> MoneyManagerEx is single entry and will never get approval in the double 
> entry community.  I like they way they do reports, but their 
> understanding of accounting is broken.

True but, as a maintainer of MMEX for Android app, I have already implemented Asset Allocation module there. The mobile app served me well for years by providing transactions in .qif files, which GnuCash also handles well. So, it remains my mobile app of choice for the moment, in combination with GnuCash.

What I would like to do, is extract the AA logic from the app, implement in some platform-neutral way (python?) and use on desktop and mobile. Since it is not complex, there is no reason for GnuCash not to implement the same concept. After all, it simply takes user-set allocation and compares to the quantity of the various commodities owned, calculating their current value by using their current price. Hence the need to have Allocation and Price elements.

> We spoke about this before.  gnc is a bad platform for trading, end of 
> discussion.

I was not in any way referring to trading but to reusing the price database file/schema. But it seems that it would be too much trouble for such a small component so nevermind.

> >     I'm wondering what the opinion here in the project would be about such
> >     an idea in terms of reuse and/or tools for populating and reading the
> >     database.
> 
> My advice is don't go there.

I still need to read the latest available prices from somewhere. I could use GnuCash book, of course, but I hate to pollute it with a bunch of prices that don't have real use inside GnuCash anyway. Actually, I'd prefer not to download any prices into my GC book apart from the ones that are generated automatically on conversion. And even those I'd prefer to clean up from time to time.
I believe I'll do all the price-sensitive calculations outside GC by reading from a separate database (or another source).

> >     I will definitely be creating a separate project for this, just hoping
> >     someone else is interested.
> 
> There is lots of scope in other projects, I don't like people forcing 
> one to be another

Hm, that gives me a few ideas already. One thing I keep forgetting is to check if perhaps someone has a similar project already. Or I could simply try fetching and caching the latest prices for all symbols on startup. And to support offline calculations, I'd still need to save data to a db. Something to be worked-out.

Anyway, it would be nice to see Asset Allocation module in GnuCash. The current implementation is just two tables. But I'm not sure if it would satisfy everybody right now. 
The only other AA implementation I found is in ledger but I have not tested it properly because my exported book doesn't balance in ledger due to mismatch in handling capital gains transactions between GC and ledger. :(

Cheers