What's your favorite year end method?

[Andrew Sackville-West]

On Tue, Dec 18, 2007 at 09:53:02PM -0800, Beth Leonard wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 18, 2007 at 10:49:30AM -0800, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:

> > I've been slowly building specs for this in my head, and need to get
> > it down into bits for others to comment on. 
> 
> If you're taking notes...

Hi Beth!

> 
> As a user, I prefer for it to "just work" as much as possible,

I continue to be of the opinion that making it "just work" involves
using the Action field, which is at least reasonably intuitive: the
tab key takes you right there, it pops up a list of reasonable
choices, etc. This has the benefit of being both a reasonable thing
for users to do, IMO, and also forces a "manual override".

> with
> the program taking it's best guess where there is unclear or
> insufficient data.  I also like the ability to do a "manual override"
> by setting a specific action for those cases where GnuCash's best
> guess isn't good enough.

If users are doing very basic things (buy, sell, reinvest dividends,
even basic splits/mergers) then there are no problems. The problems
come up when things get more complicated (spinoffs, multiple buys in
the same txn (though I think I've fixed that in my next commit),
swaps, LTCG distributions and so forth). We already have a druid for
splits/mergers. I think one might be in order for some of the other
types of more complicated txns as a means to force them into a
predetermined state. An example of this would be a dividend->cash txn
where you want to tie that dividend to the commodity. One method for
doing this is to put a zero shares/zero value split in the txn, tagged
with the Div action, using the relevant commodity's account. This
would link that dividend to its commodity quite clearly, but is
definitely unintuitive and really awkward for the user to enter
manually.

A druid is not needed, IMO, for most of the basic
stuff though. I know some people shudder at the thought of a druid,
and I sort of do too, but it's one option. 

> 
> If the ability to do a manual override is written into the report
> backend, then I'd also like it to be clear somewhere in the report
> or report options that if I don't like the results I'm seeing, I
> do have the ability to do a manual override using the action column.

I can see setting an option for using/ignoring the Action field making it
clear that using the Action column will provide better details.

> 
> Gah! Now I'm envisioning the paperclip telling me "It looks like you're
> trying to compute the basis on the stock you donated, try changing
> the action field to 'donate' in the sell transaction"

no clippy, I promise!

I think I'll start a wiki page over the holidays taking the current
stuff from Tutorial and Concepts and turning it into a framework for
how txns should be structured. Hopefully others will help fill in the
details to that there is a good spec to write to.

A
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