How to account interest rate

[Derek Atkins]

"Dmitry V'yal" <akamaus at gmail.com> writes:

> Derek Atkins wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> "Dmitry V'yal" <akamaus at gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> Hello list,
>>>
>>> I'm trying make use of scheduled transactions to track money on my
>>> bank deposit account. I'm studying how to use scheme scripting. The
>>> biggest obstacle for me is the necessary api.
>>>
>>> I couldn't find any source of documentation. Can anyone give some
>>> hints where to start?
>>
>> The biggest problem with trying to do this is that the SX system does
>> not have a "BalanceAsOfDate" function, so there's no way to compute
>> interest based on the "current balance" of an accounts.
>
> Not good..
> Would it be hard to add it?

Define hard?  Conceptually it's pretty straightforward, but as in all
things the devil is in the details.  Internally we should store the
account as a GUID, but we would want to present the account as a name to
the user.  However the current SX implementation doesn't abstract out
the storage from the display, so that would be a major issue.

> Is it feasible to build the functionality for accounting the interest
> rate on top of it? Or maybe there're some alternative approaches?

Well, if you HAD a BalanceAsOfDate() function then yes, applying tha to
the SX would be simple.   However we don't so right now doing it would
be very difficult to do automatically.

Right now your best option is to just download the monthly interest
transaction, or enter it by hand once you see it on your bank website.

You could setup an SX to remind you to insert it; use a variable for the
amount of interest, so it will ask you how much it is when you run the
SX.  But it wont auto-compute the interest for you.

Sorry,

> Dmitry

-derek

-- 
       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
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