a Quicken user tests out GnuCash...

[Conrad Canterford]

On Tue, 2003-02-25 at 18:27, James Ralston wrote:
> Ok.  Do you need any further debugging help for current CVS?

People are always welcome to help with testing CVS. The 1,8 CVS tree
will, by definition, be stable and quite safe to use.
If you're feeling a little more adventurous, you're also welcome to use
current CVS development, although I must say that while it is generally
very usable and stable, it is a development branch and sometimes that
means things get broken. I'd not recommend using CVS development for
real life, must-have-access, data. Updating, compiling and running it
occasionally will help the developers find their stuff-ups though, and
if you do it right, you can have both co-existing.

(Transaction split order)
> The reason why the order matters to me is because the split amounts
> correspond to the order of something in the real world (e.g., my
> paycheck, a restaurant check, etc.), and the real world frequently
> doesn't follow general account practices.
> <snipped>
> However, I don't think GnuCash should force GAP upon me just for the
> sake of GAP.  I want to order my splits in a manner which makes it
> easier for me.  GnuCash should give me that option, rather than
> forcing me to use the split order it thinks best adheres to GAP (but
> which I find to be significantly inconvenient).
> 
I'm not sure how hard this would be to implement. Nice theory though,
and I encourage you to raise an enhancement request against gnucash on
bugzilla.gnome.org so that it doesn't get lost. 

(Imbalanced transactions)
> But as far as I can tell, the only way it balances is by adding
> another entry into the split.  I want a button that says "balance the
> transaction by totaling up all of the splits, and then setting the
> transaction amount to that total".

There used to be a way to do this, which I suspect is still there but
which depends on what key combination you use to leave the transaction.
Experiment a bit 

> Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the interface, but I simply can't enter
> the transaction total.  I *have* to do it in the split.

You are right, there is no way to edit the transaction total as a
separate entity. The transaction "total" will always be the amount
to/from the account from which you are adding or editing the
transaction. It is the total *for that account*. To get the behaviour
you are looking for, always make sure you enter/edit the transaction
from the "source" account - ie that account from which all the money is
coming from or going to (depending on what the transaction actually is).
In your pay situation, that is almost certainly the appropriate income
account.
Its a different way of thinking about things from the way I gather
quicken does it, but its quite logical once you get used to it.

Conrad.
-- 
Conrad Canterford  (conrad at mail.watersprite.com.au)
Water Sprite Pty Ltd   |  url - http://www.watersprite.com.au/
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