default behavior of mutual fund accounts

Dale Alspach alspach@math.okstate.edu
Sat, 28 Jul 2001 11:42:56 -0500


I see one little problem with this. Cash management (money market, others?)
accounts generally use 1 dollar as the constant price of a share. In such a
case it would be better to have the price stay at 1 and the shares or value
change to the number of shares or value of the new entry.
In this case the suggestion of using
a previous price would help. It really seems that there are two different
default behaviors needed. Those where the price per share is fixed and
those where the price is taken from a previous transaction or download, but
is recomputed if both the shares and value are entered.

Would the following cover all situations?

new entry in number of shares -> price automatically entered from previous
transaction or download -> value computed automatically
(ready for possible posting)
If user goes to value field and edits, then the price is recomputed.
(This should not occur if the price is always the same since the fields
have been automatically filled correctly.)

new entry in value field -> price automatically entered from previous
transaction or download -> number of shares computed automatically
(ready for possible posting)
If user goes to number of shares and edits, then the price is recomputed.
(This should not occur if the price is always the same since the fields
have been automatically filled correctly.)

This leaves the problem of what the default beavior should be if a
previously posted transaction is edited. It seems to me that the correct
default behavior is different in this case. For fixed priced accounts an
edit should change both the number of shares and value. For variable price
items the price should be adjusted.

One could also argue that a cash management account is really a bank or
savings account and not a mutual fund and so the type mutual fund should be
used only for accounts where price is a derived number. Is this what the
developers intended? What is the correct setup for an investment account
which  has various types of investments as subaccounts? Is the top level a
bank acount which then has stocks, mutual funds, and bank accounts as
subaccounts?


Dale Alspach