Scripting Recurring Business Transactions

[Derek Atkins]

Quoting Adam Rosi-Kessel <adam at rosi-kessel.org>:

> gnucash doesn't support recurring transactions for billing customers. I
> understand that the feature is on the radar, but my impression is there is
> no active work being done on that. Is that correct?
>
> If so, I'm wondering how hard it would be to create such transactions
> through a script directly editing the XML data file. I haven't spent much
> time trying to understand how the data file works, but I'm wondering if
> anyone has tried doing this before and/or how hard it would be? I've got
> about 20 customers that I bill monthly -- each customer is billed a
> different amount, but it's the same amount every month. Is it just a matter
> of adding a couple of straightforward transactions to the XML file? Do the
> guid's have any significance other than just being unique?

UGGH!   It is NOT SUPPORTED to edit the xml file from under gnucash.
I really think this is a BAD idea.   To answer your question, however,
the GUID for an object is unique, however they are used for referential
integrity when referring to other objects.  So you need to know Account
GUIDs in order to refer to accounts.

A much better solution would be a "copy Invoice" operation, where you can
create a new invoice from an existing one.  Granted, that wouldn't really
help you script it, per se, but it would reduce the amount of work you
have to do.   If you really want to script it, you might want to consider
QSF, but that was left out of 2.0 because it was way too buggy.

-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
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