Some basic 2.01 questions...

[hendrik at topoi.pooq.com]

On Fri, Nov 10, 2006 at 11:40:36AM -0500, Derek Atkins wrote:
> Have you looked at this script written by Jonathan Kamens?
> 
>  https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2005-January/012817.html

No.  Didn't know about it.  Thanks.

-- hendrik

> 
> 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