Manual scheduled transaction entry?

[Josh Sled]

Daniel Smith <dlsmith at rice.edu> writes:
> In experimenting with the scheduled transaction facility (version  
> 2.2.0), I've been surprised that I haven't been able to manually  
> enter specific scheduled transactions.  It seems the only way to turn  
> a scheduled transaction into a real transaction is via Actions- 
>  >Scheduled Transactions->Since Last Run, and that provides no  
> control over which transactions are entered -- it just enters  
> everything scheduled up until today.  Am I missing something?

Not really.  This is not the workflow I implemented, though it's been one
we've had a couple of requests for.

<http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=460989>

(I'm trying to focus on a bigger/different problem right now, and part of my
motivation for re-writing the SX subsystem was to make it easier for others
to contribute relatively straightforward enhancements like this.  Which is a
round-about way of saying I'm not planning on working on this right now, so
if anyone wants to, feel free...)


> Here's the workflow I used in Quicken, and that I'd like to continue  
> following:
> 1) Check the scheduled list for transactions that are scheduled any  
> time before a week from now.
> 2) If something already happened (an automatic bill payment, say), or  
> I want perform it now (maybe write a rent check), select it and click  
> "record".
> 3) Adjust the recorded transaction's (or about-to-be-recorded  
> transaction's) date and amount to correspond to the actual values.
> 4) Browse the list of remaining scheduled transactions that I *don't*  
> want to record just yet, making sure I'll have the necessary funds in  
> the right place when I decide to perform them.
>
> "Scheduled Transaction Editor" makes #1 convenient, and "Since Last  
> Run" allows me to do #3, but, as best I can tell, there is no  
> mechanism for doing #2 driven by the actual occurrence of  
> transactions.  And #4 isn't very convenient, since "Scheduled  
> Transaction Editor" has a nice calendar but requires drilling down  
> into individual transactions to determine the amounts and accounts  
> involved.

Actually, you can't change the date of upcoming transactions in the Since
Last Run (SLR) dialog, though that does make good sense.  You can adjust the
created transaction dates on the "review" page if you select the "Review
created transactions" checkbox in the SLR dialog.


> What's the best way to approximate what I want with the current  
> software?  And are there planned enhancements to the scheduled  
> transaction facility that will help?  Should I consider submitting  
> anything as a feature request?

As you say, the Since Last Run dialog only looks at transactions to be
created from the last time SLR was run until today; actually, it looks up
until (today + sx.create_in_advance_days + sx.remind_in_advance_days).

The best approach to get what you want at the moment is to setup the
scheduled transactions to either create- or remind- in advance for some
window of time, say 7 days.  Then, they'll appear in the SLR dialog, and you
can change their state as necessary to postpone or create them.

I suggest using the "remind in advance" setting, as the default would be to
only remind – not create – transactions that you forget/miss changing to
"postpone".

-- 
...jsled
http://asynchronous.org/ - a=jsled; b=asynchronous.org; echo ${a}@${b}
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