How to account interest rate

[Robin Chattopadhyay]

I think even if there were a BalanceAsOfDate() function, one would be easily
frustrated using it to calculate the interest earned on a bank account. Most
banks (in the U.S., anyway) accrue interest daily and compound monthly. So,
in order to calculate the interest correctly, you need to know the balance
of the account for each day of the period. The dates for your transactions
in GnuCash would have to exactly match the transaction dates that the bank
used to post the same transaction. For a transactional account (like
checking or N.O.W. account), this would quickly become impractical.

My $0.02.

Robin

On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 11:37 AM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:

> "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
>       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available
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