Formula Parsing Error with Scheduled Transaction WAS: Limit on Scheduled Transactions Since Last Run?

Elwood elwoodblues at bellsouth.net
Wed Mar 5 00:09:53 EST 2014 

You make some good points.

The effort versus the payoff is easily not worth it after some amount of fiddling with it.  The only real benefit is the convenience of your interest total being in the same tool as all your other tax and financial information, but you can figure that with an online calculator to quickly generate an amortization table anyhow.  Other than that, I suppose it would just be the somewhat perverse satisfaction that you had managed to replicate every last detail of your financial life in one tool.  I probably messed with it way longer than I should have, but I kept digging because I didn't need escrow or anything else fancy and I felt like I was so close each time to making it work.

I am not a developer, but I work with them daily, and I can certainly understand having to rationalize every feature or even bug fix when trying to balance scope, quality, resources, and time.  I can see how the mortgage bit only really helps a portion of the personal finance users, while some other features would probably benefit business and home users alike.


As for the one particular issue related to not being able to modify a SX with a formula due to the parsing error:  Would this be of interest to others beyond the scope of just the mortgage tool?  My understanding is you can manually write formulas within any SX, but I suppose maybe this would be a small crowd as well?  Can't think of a good example off the top of my head.  FWIW, it does appear to be something that was introduced with 2.6.

Also, echoing your sentiments, kudos to everyone involved in the actual production of GC.  I'm not really familiar with enough usernames yet to know who's who, and hopefully any frustration that might have crept in to my documentation of issues would not be taken as ingratitude by anyone.  It is a remarkable tool considering what all it can do, and that it is available across multiple operating systems.



________________________________
 From: Lincoln A Baxter <lab at lincolnbaxter.com>
To: Elwood <elwoodblues at bellsouth.net> 
Cc: gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org> 
Sent: Tuesday, March 4, 2014 5:54 AM
Subject: Re: Formula Parsing Error with Scheduled Transaction WAS: Limit on Scheduled Transactions Since Last Run?
 

I haven't seen anyone say this, on this thread so I will.  I looked at
the Mortgage druid at one point in the past and decided it was not worth
the effort.  It is more complicated than just amortization calculations,
since taxes and insurance escrows, are often wrapped in to the mortgage
payment.

So, for my mortgage, which had started many years before I started using
GC, I simply transfered into the a mortgage liability account (from the
opening balances account) at the beginning of the year I started using
GC.  

Then I scheduled a monthly payments (in transaction scheduler) to the
liability account for the amount of the payment the bank gets.  

Each year, when I did my taxes, I  transfered the interest (and other
expenses the bank was escrowing for) to the appropriate tax and
insurance expense accounts, and I transfered the principle repaid to an
asset account for my home.  If I had chosen to model the banks escrow
account, I would have set that up as an asset account and done these
transfers from there (annually when I did my taxes). The result was that
the balance in the liability account (the mortgage) was the principle
owed at the beginning of the next year.  

That was good enough for the effort expended.

My perspective was, that having an accounting down to the month (which
is the best you can hope for in the case of a mortgage) for these values
did not really add much value (for the effort of accounting on a monthly
basis), since one has to make the full bank payment anyway, and managing
one's checking account and tracking other (more variable) expenses,
returns far greater value for the effort expended. This is especially
the case for mortgages, since it is not possible to really track the
value of your real estate asset the mortgage offsets, beyond what you
paid for it at the time, since it may have appreciated or depreciated
with a lot more variability than that which is introduced by accounting
precisely for the mortgage on a monthly basis.  The only time one will
real know this is when one agrees to a sale price with a buyer.  And
that is the only time it really makes a real difference to one's life

This might be why the urge to scratch the itch related to perfecting the
mortgage druid has not risen above other desires among those who
contribute to GC. Personally, I think other desired features do/can add
much more value -- like the improvement to the CSV transaction importer
for instance.  All fixes and improvements require someone with
development skills to donate time and effort, and those donations are
always going to be made where there is the greatest perceived value from
the perspective of the person doing the donating. 

GC is a fabulous improvement over using a spreadsheet to manage
accounts, which is what I was doing prior using GC. It is also a
fabulous improvement over non-FOSS software like Quicken. One doesn't
pay a thing for it, and it runs on Unix/Linux. I'm very happy. :-)

Thank you Derick and the entire GC development community for all your
efforts.  

Lincoln

-- Using GC 2.4.10 on Debian "wheezy" 




On Mon, 2014-03-03 at 23:45 -0600, Elwood wrote:
> Ok, I worked out how to do this by referencing an amortization table for my loan, and creating multiple sets of scheduled transactions through the Mortgage & Loan Repayment interface.  Basically a new set for every 50 payments, each time starting with a new loan balance and a shorter length.  Sadly, this will not work either, at least on my installation.  Once the scheduled transactions are processed, they are entered for the correct dates (which are in the past, per what I selected in the UI), but the principal and interest amounts appear to be for the next ten months from today.
> 
> So, unless you are setting up a brand new mortgage going forward from the current month, it appears there is no point fighting with the Mortgage & Loan tool currently.  You can not win. ;-)
> 
> To summarize for future GC converts trying to setup existing mortgages (in 2.6.2 at least):
> 1.  The start date parameters you enter, the transaction preview, and the actual scheduled transactions do not align.
> 2.  When working in the past, it seems to limit the schedule to 50 transactions from the start date.
> 3.  In 2.6.x, you can not edit this limit (or any other SX parameter) due to the parse error with the interest and payment formulas.  (Not an issue in 2.4 I think)
> 4.  Even if you work around 1, 2, and 3, you end up with the wrong principal and interest values.
> 
> > On Mar 3, 2014, at 3:27 PM, Elwood <elwoodblues at bellsouth.net> wrote:
> > 
> > As a workaround, does anyone know if it would be possible to construct this as multiple individual scheduled transactions, each no longer than the "default" limit GC seems to be applying?  Or is that crazy talk?
> > 
> > 
> >> On Feb 28, 2014, at 7:06 AM, Elwood <elwoodblues at bellsouth.net> wrote:
> >> 
> >> 
> >> 
> >> I've gone ahead and entered this as a bug.  Details duplicated here for anyone interested:
> >> 
> >> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=725366
> >> Standard formulas for principal and interest from the Mortgage and Loan Setup
> >> Tool fail to parse in the Edit Scheduled Transaction interface in 2.6.1.  Error
> >> says:  "Couldn't parse debit formula for split "xyz"."  Formulas in the debit
> >> column are the typical ones generated by the Mortgage tool:  ppmt( 0.05000 /
> >> 12.00 : i : 180.00 : 100000.00 : 0 : 0 ) and ipmt( 0.05000 / 12.00 : i : 180.00
> >> : 100000.00 : 0 : 0 ). The scheduled transaction will run, but you can not adjust any of the
> >> parameters of it, because it will never parse, and therefore never save your
> >> changes. If you edit the scheduled transaction formulas and replace the "i" with an
> >> actual number, the parse succeeds and the changes can be saved (after
> >> confirming the "cannot automatically balance this transaction" warning). Seems to work fine in 2.4.11.
> >> 
> >> 
> >> ________________________________
> >> From: Elwood <elwoodblues at bellsouth.net>
> >> To: "gnucash-user at gnucash.org" <gnucash-user at gnucash.org> 
> >> Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2014 12:13 AM
> >> Subject: Re: Limit on Scheduled Transactions Since Last Run?
> >> 
> >> 
> >> Ok, stalled again.  Apparently this works ok on the test system in 2.4.11, but not in 2.6.1.  After editing the scheduled transaction, 2.4.11 prompts to say "The Scheduled Transaction Editor cannot automatically balance this transaction.  Should it still be entered?" and allows you to pick Yes or No.  I assume this is because of the formulas for the mortgage payment, principal, and interest.  For some reason in 2.6.1 it prompts with 'Couldn't parse debit formula for split "Acme Mortgage - Interest". ' and then it only allows you to click close, leaving you in the editor.  After that, all you can do is cancel without saving your changes.  So close, yet so far.  :-(
> >> 
> >>> On Feb 25, 2014, at 11:45 PM, Elwood <elwoodblues at bellsouth.net> wrote:
> >>> 
> >>> Never mind.  I think I found the cause. 
> >> Apparently, if I look at the transaction in the scheduled transaction editor before trying the Since Last Run, you can see that it was created with the Occurrences to Repeat Until 7/1/2007 for some reason.  If you manually change it to repeat until the end date of the loan, it will create all transactions up through today's date.  Not sure if I'd call this a bug or not, but definitely confusing.
> >>> 
> >>> 
> >>>> On Feb 25, 2014, at 11:27 PM, Elwood <elwoodblues at bellsouth.net> wrote:
> >>>> 
> >>>> I've been playing with the Mortgage and Loan Repayment Setup tool, trying to recreate my existing mortgage.  (Ultimately, to replace my current bad practice of simply chucking the mortgage payment into a Housing expense account.)  After much trial and error, I can finally get the tool to not skip the first payment, BUT
> >> because the mortgage started in 2003, it creates a backlog of scheduled transactions.  When I go to use the Since Last Run feature, it will only show 50 transactions pending in the "To-Create" status, with dates from 2003 to 2007.  If I go ahead and process them, I indeed get only the first 50 mortgage payments.
> >>>> 
> >>>> Is there some limitation on the number of scheduled transactions that can be queued up at one time for the Since Last Run feature?
> >>>> 
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