automatic progressive transaction id across accounts

[paolo palmerini]

Dear all,
havard is absolutely right regarding the interpretation of what i need.
thanks for putting it clearer than i did ;-)
actually , with respect to the list below, i would say that everything
but the last two are strict requirements in my case.

since it does not seem to be a "natural" feature of gnucash, maybe we
should move this discussion to the developers list in order to start
thinking of if and how to start doing it. not sure that i will manage,
though... let's see.

thanks for the support havard. if you are still in we can try to
coordinate our efforts.
p.

On 05/24/2009 10:10 PM, Havard Rast Blok wrote:
> Hi again,
>
> Although I'm not 100% about Paolo's usage, I can imagine that a 32
> byte "random" string is not quite what he had in mind.
>
> For my own business accounting, every single transaction has to be
> backed by a physical receipt. To easily search and identify the pile
> of papers which quickly accumulate, each receipt is numbered, from 1
> and up. The link between the papers and the accounting system is this
> number. In other systems, this number is auto-incremented for each new
> transaction.
>
> From my point of view, the requirements for this ID would be:
> - Auto-increment for each new transaction.
> - IDs of previously typed transactions should not be altered.
> - +1 increment should continue even if a new transaction is back-dated
> to a date before a transaction with a lower ID.
> - There should be a user defined starting ID.
> - Padded zero's should be respected, e.g. 0001, or 09001.
> - Based on what Paolo mentioned, there might also be a requirement to
> define a more complex ID, i.e. based on country, department, etc:
> UK-HR-2009-0001.
>
> Regards,
> Havard
>
>
> Yawar Amin wrote:
>> Hi Paolo,
>>
>> I can confirm that every transaction in Gnucash has a unique ID. In fact
>> most entities inside a Gnucash file--accounts, transactions, splits,
>> currencies--have unique IDs. These are 32-character GUIDs, or globally
>> unique identifiers, where each character is a digit in the hexadecimal
>> radix. In short, you're pretty much guaranteed that every transaction in
>> every Gnucash file in the world has a unique ID. However, I don't think
>> these IDs are incremented one by one when new transactions are added.
>> So you
>> can't do certain things, like calculate how many transactions there are
>> between any two given transactions.
>>
>> Having said that, I think the transaction GUID should satisfy your admin
>> dept. Of course, these IDs aren't visible in the Gnucash user interface.
>> You'll need to open up the XML file to examine them, or have a
>> program/script written which does that.
>>
>> HTH,
>>
>> Yawar
>>
>> On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 3:00 AM, paolo palmerini
>> <paolo at palmerini.org>wrote:
>>
>>> dear all,
>>> i am a new gnucash user and i am trying to promote the wide scale
>>> adoption of gnucash within my NGO,  working in about 10 different
>>> countries with different languages and currencies. gnucash seems to be
>>> the right software to manage our accounts but still there are a couple
>>> of issues that limit its unconditional adoption.
>>>
>>> the first and most important requirement coming from my organisation
>>> admin department is the possibility of automatic numbering of
>>> transactions across different accounts within the same gnucash file.
>>>
>>> from what i understand, at present gnucash provides a "num" field for
>>> each transaction that can be manually filled by the user and can
>>> be automatically incremented within the same account typing the
>>> "+" key on it. however, the system does not prevent from assigning
>>> twice
>>> the same number to different transactions within the same account or
>>> across different accounts.
>>>
>>> my question is: is there a simple way to achieve this automatic
>>> progressive numbering (with the possibility of resetting the numbering
>>> every year?). if not, where in the code would one have to put his/her
>>> hands to add this feature?
>>>
>>> last question: am i the only one with such requirement? is there
>>> another
>>> way to get a unique transaction id?
>>>
>>> thanks for any help,
>>> p.
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> me, myself... [http://www.palmerini.org]
>>> ...and my podcast
>>> [http://www.palmerini.org/podkasbaht]
>>>
>>>
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>
>

-- 
me, myself... [http://www.palmerini.org]
...and my podcast
[http://www.palmerini.org/podkasbaht]