Stocks and Balancing Accounts

[Mike Alexander]

--On June 18, 2008 11:23:08 AM -0400 Derek Atkins <warlord at MIT.EDU> 
wrote:

> My reasoning is that when I go to a bank and exchange $100 for
> €74.29 I don't mentally consider it a split transaction, and indeed
> as far as *I* am concerned it ISNT a Split transaction.  The fact
> that it's an exchange should not MAKE it a split transaction.
> Now, if there were a commission fee associated, then obviously
> the commission could either be considered part of the exchange rate
> or it could be its own split.  Probably it should be its own split.
> But adding two additional "real" splits to account for the exchange
> just makes it visually messy.

This is more or less what my changes do.  The accounts aren't hidden by 
default (but that's a trivial change).  However a transaction that 
contains exactly four splits, two "real" splits and two commodity 
exchange splits, shows up in the register as if it had just the two 
real splits (if splits aren't expanded).  The other splits are still 
there and if you expand the splits then you see, and can change, all 
four of them.  If the transaction has these four splits plus more (a 
commission, for example) then it shows up as a multiple split 
transaction.

This works reasonably well even with the current register code.  I 
suspect it could be made to work much better with the register rewrite 
that is under way although I'll have to admit that I haven't tried that 
yet.

-- 
Mike Alexander           mta at umich.edu
Ann Arbor, MI            PGP key ID: BEA343A6