Some basic 2.01 questions...

[Derek Atkins]

Have you looked at this script written by Jonathan Kamens?

 https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2005-January/012817.html

It seems silly to write yet another external script.
If you wanted to add the functionality INTERNALLY, that
would be worth your time!  There's nobody actively working
on it right now.

-derek

hendrik at topoi.pooq.com writes:

> On Thu, Nov 09, 2006 at 07:46:21PM +0000, Maf. King wrote:
>> On Thursday 09 November 2006 19:12, Brian Keener wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Brian
>> 
>> > Actually, it's probably more of a "double-entry accounting" question...
>> >
>> > So I've got the basics down so far; every payday, I transfer money from
>> > "Income:Salary" to my main checking account, and as I pay bills/write
>> > checks I transfer money from checking to expense:auto:gas etc. etc. etc.
>> >
>> > Now, that leaves me with ever-increasing values in my expenses columns and
>> > income columns, which looks a little strange to me.  That's pretty much to
>> > be expected, I assume?
>> Yep.
>> 
>> >
>> > But what about a few months/years/whatever down the road, is it really
>> > useful to know I spent $15,823 in gasoline since November 2006?  Can those
>> > values be filtered so that only the last month or so shows up?
>
> What I find useful about this approach is that you can easily picj any 
> two dates and find what you spent between them with one simple 
> subtraction.
>
>> >
>> 
>> 
>> Book closing isn't in GC yet, but I believe it is under development.
>
> Really?  I was vaguely thinking of taking on the job myself.  I've 
> already written a piece of code that totals a year's transactins in the 
> way that I find useful for tax and budgeting purposes here (yes, it's 
> *very* specific to my family's requirements, names of specific accounts 
> built into the code, and all that, and not really in a form 
> that would be useful to others),  but the so-called "closing the books" 
> is somnething I was thinking of tackling next.  Only being a computer 
> programmer and not an accountant, it probably won't be up to 
> "accepted accounting practices."
>
> What I was planning on doing was:
>   reading in a file of transactions
>   accepting a cutoff date from the command line
>   breaking the set of transactions up into the ones before and after 
> that date
>   Totalling the transactions before said date so as to establish new 
> initial balances
>   writing out two files contiaining the transactions before and after 
> and, of course, all the undated information, like accound defiitions and 
> th like.
>
>   Is this kind of what everyone would like to see?  The idea is to do 
> this *after* all the relevant data has been entered and all accounts 
> reconciled up to at least the cutoff date.
>
>   The hard part will be to make sure *all* the incidental data in the 
> data base is accurately copied, even those forms of data that I don't 
> use in my own accounts.
>
>   I have imagined this as a stand-alone program that operates on the 
> gnucash file.  But I've heard that gnucash has been in the process of 
> learning to talk to a separate back-end data base.  If that's the case, 
> a completely different aproach is probably needed, which may or may not 
> be more than I want to tackle.
>
>   Does gnucash 2.xx still use the same old file format?  Or is it 
> radically different?  At the moment I'm still using gnucash 1.8.xx 
> because my systems are straddling the fence between Debian and Ubuntu 
> and upgrades are awkward to coordinate reliably (this involves bugs in X 
> and issues that have nothing to do with gnucash, so I won't elaborate 
> here).
>
> -- hendrik
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-- 
       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