Actions - what for?

[Linas Vepstas]

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On Wed, Apr 25, 2001 at 12:55:08AM -0700, Cory Dodt was heard to remark:
> I've just noticed that 1.5.x doesn't seem to save whatever you put into
> the Action field in the double-line register.  In fact, it deletes them if
> you had anything there and upgraded from 1.4.x. =20
>=20
> This isn't crucial, since I don't know what it's for.  I can see that
> there are different types of transactions in there depending on the
> account type- for example Buy for credit cards and POS for checking
> accounts.  But beyond that I don't see the point.  Is it just another way
> to search for transactions?  Or is there a real accounting meaning behind
> each of the different actions?  They don't seem to affect the rest of the
> transaction.  For example, gnucash treats as valid a "Buy" action attached
> to a credit card payment.

there is no accounting meaning attached to 'action'. Its original intent
was to allow the user to classify transactions in thier own user-definable,
extensible way, and then be able to use the 'action' field to generate
reports, graphs. =20

e.g. show graph of interest income vs. dividend income.=20

One way that gnucash would know that something was 'dividend income'
was if you had marked it that way in 'action'.   (The other way is to have
separate dividend and interest income accounts, but that leads to an
explosion in the number of accounts: a dozen accounts might need a hundred
subaccounts indiciating 'what type' of income and expense the thing was:
bleach. So action s a qucik & easy way of marking this kind of info without
having to put a deep meaning into it ...)

The mechanism is somewhat in disrepair; there are some nice ways to
generalize it (such as assigning more than one action to a split, allowing
user to add arbitrary actions,  customizing the list of actions to be
different for different accounts).   Never mind that I'm not sure that the
graphing & reporting side is using this field, just yet ...


--linas

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