Trying to create a 24-weekly Scheduled Transaction

[Michael Hendry]

On 2 May 2013, at 09:33, prl <prl at ozemail.com.au> wrote:

> I'm unclear what you want to do - if it's a transaction that happens exactly once every 24 weeks (or any number of weeks), then you need to specify which day of the week. Isn't it possible to tell what day the transaction would happen on?

You're absolutely right - I can work out the day for the first transaction, and once I've selected that, subsequent payments will always occur on the same day of the week. 

I suppose I had made the assumption that GC would be able to work out the day of the week of the first transaction from the start date.

I've been looking at the various intervals offered by GC for SXs, wondering why only the Weekly option requires a choice of day-of-the-week, although the day of the week is implicit in the choice of Start Date.

I suppose the reason for this option is that it's the only way of putting in an SX for a transaction that occurs (for example) every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, which would otherwise have to be achieved by having three SXs, one set as a weekly transaction every Monday, one every Wednesday and one every Friday.

Is there any reason why GC shouldn't default to selecting the day-of-the-week from the date of the first transaction, but accept editing of the day of the week for these special purposes?

> 
> If the transaction will occur on any day of the week it falls due, just set up the transaction so it is entered for the earliest day that it could occur. That will give a conservative view of your available balance. You can then correct the transaction date after it has occurred, if you want to.
> 
> Is the magazine really always published exactly 13 times a year (in which case it's not published exactly every 4 weeks), or is it published exactly every 4 weeks, and can in fact be published 14 times some years, e.g. on 1 Jan and then later on 31 Dec?

As far as I know, the magazine is published 13 times a year, which means that the cycle of direct debits is not in phase with the cycle of publication of the payments. If I subscribe for a sufficiently long time (and the magazine continues to be published!), I will eventually be making three payments in one calendar year.

A quick experiment with a spreadsheet shows that If the first payment had been made on 1st Jan 2013, I'd make three payments in 2013, 2018, 2024 and 2030, and two in the intervening years.

I must write to the Pedant's Corner section of the magazine to point this out!

Michael

> I have regular 2-week transactions (always on the same day of the week) and they work just fine. They're important ones - the days I get paid :)
> 
> Peter
> 
> On 2/05/13 15:06, Michael Hendry wrote:
>> I subscribe to a magazine which is published thirteen times a year, but whose subscription is paid by direct debit every six issues (i.e. every 24 weeks).
>> 
>> When I try to set up this transaction, with a frequency of Weekly, every 24 weeks starting on 6th June 2013 and lasting forever, I'm told "You have attempted to set up a Scheduled Transaction which will never run. Do you really want to do this?".
>> 
>> I've worked around this by selecting "Monday" as the day of the week for the transaction, but this means that the date will be wrong for six transactions in every seven.
>> 
>> I did try selecting all seven days, but it looks as though this will set up a run of seven consecutive daily transactions every 24 weeks.
>> 
>> I can tolerate having a relatively small transaction appearing up to six days late, using the work-around above, but I don't think I should be forced to do so - am I missing something here?
>> 
>> Michael
>> 
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