Entering scheduled transactions.

[Josh Sled]

On Sun, Feb 08, 2004 at 11:11:08AM +1100, Doug Laidlaw wrote:

| I use scheduled transactions more as reminders.  If I have a schedulered bank 
| debit, there is no problem.  If I have an account to take action to pay, I 
| schedule it for the due date.  When I enter the transaction in Quicken or 
| Money, I get a dialog allowing me to change the date and the amount (for 
| bills that vary,) while leaving the scheduled item unchanged for the next 
| time.  There seems to be no equivalent in Gnucash?  I can do nothing except 
| enter the transaction for the set amount on the set date.

You can use the scheduled transactions in the way you describe.

In the Scheduled Transaction editor, you can specify that you should be
reminded of the transaction X days in advance [where X can be 0].

As well, the template transaction in the editor will accept non-numeric
character strings [such as "amount"] as a /variable/.

When the since-last-run dialog is invoked, it will show the recently
"come-due" transactions, as reminders if configured as such, and allow
you to either defer or create the transaction.  If you decide to create
the transaction, it will prompt you to provide a value for the variable
you defined in the template transaction, and create the transaction with
that value substituted in; if only numeric values were used, there won't
be any value-prompting.  You can also edit the specific date or modify
the amount on the subsequent review page.

[The template transaction, here, can acutally contain an expression
 containing variables.  If you have a multi-person or multi-party payment,
 for example, you could make the asset-account split debit value "part_a +
 part_b + part_c", and the expense-accountsplit credit values "part_a",
 "part_b", "part_c".  It will prompt you for the three parts, and create
 the correct transaction on the books.]

You can do this by either creating a new Scheduled Transaction from scratch,
or by right-clicking on an existing transaction and "schedule..."ing it.

...jsled

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