Is Bills Due Reminder broken ?

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

John Zoetebier <john.zoetebier at transparent.co.nz> writes:

> I have entered the transactions of the last three months in gnucash.
> Reconciled all bank accounts.
> To my big surprise when restarting gnucash I got 7 Bill reminders.
> Not knowing what the problem was I paid one of the bills again and
> removed the original transaction from account Payables.

how did you "pay the bill"?  Did you just enter in a transaction by
hand?  If so, that's not the right way to pay a bill.  You MUST USE
the "Process Payment" interface in order to pay your bills.  The Bills
Due reminder will keep on reminding you until you pay your bill
through the proper interface.

> Now other bills are reminded.
> I repeated this with other bills and the result is actualy
> unpredictable with regardto bill reminder.

Uhh, I don't know what you mean, here..  I'll go test it some more,
but it should print out in a consistent order from run-to-run.
Admittedly I don't actually set an order...

> It seems that no matter what I due the system keeps reminding of bills
> that have already been paid with ever changing amounts.

HUH?  "Ever changing amounts?"   This I don't believe.

> Also the order in which bills are reminded changes each time I restart
> gnucash.
> It seems there is no order on date, company or amount.

This also seems strange -- the query should return a consistent order
run after run.  But I'll take a look anyways just to make sure.

> Luckely enough I can switch off the bill reminder under preferences.
> My question: is Bill Reminder broken ?

Well, the 1.8 Bills-Due reminder was a hack.  CVS HEAD has a
completely new infrastructure in place for reminders like it, but
back-porting to 1.8.4 would be more work than I want to do.  However,
what's there in 1.8.4 shouldn't be broken....

Could you give more explicit examples?

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available