GnuCash 3.0 initial observations

Fri Apr 6 10:36:55 EDT 2018

Adrien,

John is right about that bug I linked to - it’s not a price source selection problem, it’s more involved than that. He helped last time around in fixing one aspect of that bug, but needs more work I think.

Thing is, Indian tax laws require us to quote the cost of investment on all financial holdings and the balance sheet report up until 2.6.11 has given me the correct numbers. This is what is stopping me from upgrading to 2.6.20 (when it’s released) or 3.0 version.

On the currency font selection, I tried changing the font on Default stylesheet, but to no effect. Seems like the report is getting these setting from someplace else. However, upon running other reports, I now see that this isn’t a major issue for me. Only on the balance sheet (eguile) report, currency is printed in bold and thus makes it look patchy. On many other reports, most of the line items are in regular font (showing the currency clearly) and only the summary total lines have the currency marked in bold, where it looks patchy. I can live with it because you can see what the currency is from the rest of the report sections.

Thank you for the tip on changing the delimiter on the price source file. I changed it from comma to pipe and it was able to see the columns properly. I still had an issue with selecting the column type from the grid showing the data file. But the trick is to click on the grid header and when the list with 4 column type options pops up, I have to scroll down the list using the keyboard and make the selection. If I scroll down using the mouse, then no selection is being made. With that workaround and a pipe delimited file, I was able to import a price data file successfully.

On the balance sheet (eguile) error, I am at a loss. I don’t use trading accounts, my entire datafile is in a single currency, but I do have accounts tracking stock/mutual fund buys and sells. Will report back if I can provide more information.

The CSV price importer and GST Income Statement report (this is a valuable new report in 3.0) are strong reasons for me to move to 3.0, but I can’t until my balance sheet reflects correct numbers.

I also think the CSV transaction importer can act as a surrogate for breaking up transactions in 1 account into sub-accounts if needed. Up until now, rolling up from sub-accounts into a parent or merging 2 accounts was easy, but splitting transactions in an account into many sub accounts was not. I think the CSV transaction importer can provide many benefits in this regard.

Cheers,
Deva

> On 05-Apr-2018, at 9:07 PM, Adrien Monteleone <adrien.monteleone at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Apr 5, 2018, at 7:43 AM, Deva - <pobox.deva at outlook.in> wrote:
>> 
>> Hello,
>> 
>> Firstly, thank you all for this new and much awaited version.
>> 
>> I have just installed GC 3.0 on Mac OS High Sierra 10.13.4 and have been browsing through what’s new and what’s improved and these are observations from my initial test run…
>> 
>> 1. When I first moved from 2.6.6 to 2.6.19, I ran into an issue with average cost as a price source on my mutual fund account. See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=775368. I thought this was fixed in 3.0, but it doesn’t seem to be. Note, however, that the use case I gave in that bug report earlier has been fixed, but other investment accounts seem to have issues. Upon reviewing the account with the cost issue, only thing I can see is that when a mutual fund account has both purchases and redemptions, the balance sheet report using average cost price source doesn’t report the cost correctly. When there are only purchases, the cost is computed correctly. Is anyone else seeing this problem? I am keen on moving to 3.0 due to other features introduced in this version, but this is keeping me grounded. I can share an account report and the balance sheet report privately to whoever is interested in diagnosing this problem.
>> 
> I think that’s intended behavior of the ‘average cost’ option. (‘cost’ is supposed to only look at buys, not sells, but it in fact, looks at both) You probably want ‘weighted average’ instead. Read over this comment from a bug report on the ‘average cost’ issue: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=775368#c4
> 
> This was ‘fixed’ by making ’nearest in time’ the default instead of ‘average cost’.
> 
>> 2. The currency symbol (INR in this case) is printed in bold (looks that way from its appearance), which makes it look like a blob on the reports. On the main CoA page, the currency is distinctly clearer. Is there a setting to make it look like the way it appears on CoA? (see screenshot attached)
> 
> I could be wrong, but that looks like a font issue. Perhaps experiment with the choices for the stylesheet. It might be a simple solution of increasing the size, but finding a cleaner font might be the best route.
>> 
>> 3. One much awaited feature is the ability to import prices from a csv file. I could never get Finance::Quote to work with my India stocks and mutual funds, so I have been manually updating prices on a monthly basis. So this feature greatly helps. When I try to do a sample import of prices, I ran into an issue. My csv file has 4 columns - date (dd-mm-yyyy), ticker, price, currency. So on the import screen, I clicked on the header (of the datafile shown in a grid) and 4 options crop up to select date, commodity from, currency to and amount. But I am unable to select any of these options to designate the column as a date, amount, etc. It shows me a drop down listing 4 options for column type, but no matter what I click, nothing gets selected. On this screen, I did select the date format as d-m-y.
> 
> Based on the initial report in this older bug report: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=779565, perhaps try changing the delimiter and/or closing the book and trying again.
> 
>> 
>> 4. When I first came across balance sheet (eguile) report in 2.6.6, I took a liking for this report more than the regular balance sheet report. However, the eguile report contained a warning as a footnote saying - Development version - double check the numbers…
>> In all the time I have looked at this report since, I haven’t come across any differences between the eguile and the non-eguile versions. I haven’t scrutinised this on an account by account basis, just on an overall equity, assets, liability, etc. and the numbers always matched.
>> But I see this warning even in the 3.0 version! Has anyone ever had problems trusting the numbers on the eguile report?
>> 
>> 5. Having said that, v3.0 does seem to have a problem with the eguile balance sheet report (see screenshot attached). Towards the end, where it prints the exchange rates used for stock prices, it’s showing some sort of internal report error.
> 
> Looks like the report needs to be updated for 3.0. This might be some guidance with respect to your #4.
> 
>> 
>> 6. Despite these observations, if I start using GC 3.0 and later decide to go back to 2.6.* versions due to balance sheet inconsistencies, is that possible? I seem to recall reading some notes on the release stating that latest versions change folder locations and some internal structural changes, so I worry that once I save a datafile in 3.0, it may prevent me from opening it in 2.6.11 (say) - my last stable version where the balance sheet numbers are still shown correctly.
> 
> Based on the release notes, because of the matching filters used for your imported transactions, you will only be able to open the file with 2.6.20 (soon to be released) or 3.0. You’d have to upgrade that 2.6.11 version.
> 
> 
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Deva
>> [cid:3F033200-4983-44C5-B123-3A64EC836019 at Belkin]
>> [cid:F28BB88B-9071-4915-986F-7E9FBBC2A6DC at Belkin]
>> <ccy.png><bs eguile.png>_______________________________________________
>> gnucash-user mailing list
>> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
>> To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe:
>> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
>> If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information.
>> -----
>> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
>> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
> 