What's your favorite year end method?

[Donald Allen]

On Dec 17, 2007 12:57 PM, Andrew Sackville-West <ajswest at mindspring.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 17, 2007 at 12:28:25PM -0500, Donald Allen wrote:
> > I think it is pretty clear that the current reports implementation is
> > a problem.
>
> ...
>
> I don't think you'll get any disagreement about this.
>
>
> > In an ideal world, gnucash would be as brilliant at making information
> > of all that data that  it lets us accumulate so naturally, and in
> > practice I think it fails in that regard (and, yes, I fully understand
> > that this is a labor of love and that the developers have day jobs;
> > I'm not being critical of anyone; I'm simply calling a spade a spade,
> > at least as I see it).
>
> see above.
>
>
> > This is why I'm working on the Python program I
> > mentioned in an email to this thread last night. I'm already getting
> > income statement, balance sheet, net worth, and unrealized gains (with
> > dividends) reports from it, sorted and presented the way I want
> > them.
>
> I don't want to speak for jsled, but he has talked a couple of times
> about starting a next generation reporting system. He's even sketched
> in some beginning design ideas (see -devel archives). The point is to
> maintain the current reporting strucutre and keep it functioning while
> a new structure gets put in place. This is no small task.
>
> > Where they should, items it reports agree with gnucash to the penny.
> > And it generates these reports in less than 30 seconds on a TP T60 (2
> > Ghz Core 2 Duo). This was an act of desperation on my part, because I
> > couldn't get gnucash to answer many key questions I had about my own
> > finances, and a look at the reporting code led me to conclude that
> > making an investment in improving what's there was not likely to be
> > feasible or effective, given my time constraints and my worries about
> > the performance of guile/scheme
>
> I don't think anyone is married to Scheme. jsled wants to move the
> option generation back into C and then any swig-ified language can be
> used to generate reports. If I remember correctly, you are parsing the
> actual data file instead of using the gnucash engine, correct? It
> would be great if your efforts could be redirected at helping to
> implement a new reporting structure instead :-)

I'd be happy to help with that if I can, but I can't allow them to be
mutually exclusive. Reimplementing gnucash reports is going to be on a
longer time scale than I can tolerate (multiple people involved,
disagreements about design need to be hashed out, it has to be
general, it lives in the complex gnucash environment, etc.) and I need
to solve my problem now. So I have no choice but to continue to work
on my little utility.

>
> also, just out of curiosity, how are you computing your unrealized
> gains above? I'm having a terrible time getting the information I want
> out of gnucash without relying on the user behaving in specific
> ways. I have avoided things like using the Action field, for example,
> in stock transactions because they aren't required to enter the
> txn.

I implemented it first without requiring anything in the action
fields, using a simple heuristic to distinguish transactions that push
a position in the same direction it's already gone (long or short)
from those that go the opposite way (they need to be processed
somewhat differently). But I decided to use the action fields instead,
because it made a number of things cleaner, easier and more accurate.
I did have to clean up my own data to fix the places where the actions
were null or wrong. This is the kind of thing I can require of myself,
but perhaps not of others.

For dividend accounts, I also want to relate them to a commodity, so
that I can show dividends received in both an unrealized and realized
gains report. For that, I enter security namespace:symbol in the
income account's code field, to serve as a pointer to the commodity.
Again, something I can require of myself.

/Don


>
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