[GNC] [GNC-dev] Automatically split transactions with sales tax

[Michael or Penny Novack]

On 11/11/2018 6:23 AM, elvis wrote:
> Seriously? Are you just telling someone to type stuff stuff in? The 
> WHOLE point of computers is to automate stuff.....
>
> What if they have 1000 transactions? At a minute a transaction that a 
> whole day entering stuff that could be in under a SECOND....
>
> I know if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, but really 
> we should be thinking of inventing a better hammer... or eliminating 
> the screw entirely. 

  Well yes, and this used to be exactly my line of country, writing 
"sproj's" (special projects; ad hoc programs) to generate thousands of 
transactions.  Well more like tens of thousands, which would be a lot of 
end users entering by hand for day after after day. But please take note 
of that "ad hoc" because almost never EXACTLY the same even when the 
same type of transaction being generated. Sure, I had useful skeletons 
in my library, 90+% of the program going to be the same but needing 
changes before each use << my main activity my last few weeks before 
retirement was to get that library indexed "this skeleton is good for 
that" so junior programmers could use it >>

THAT is why this sort of thing best done OUTSIDE of gnucash, a stand 
alone program (that took "instruction input" and data input) which 
created a file to be imported. Not PART of gnucash because one user's 
needs will not be the same as another's. To make this clear .....

Person who made the initial request ---- please describe YOUR situation 
in detail. What input would you be expecting to feed this program and 
how would it calculate the tax amount to be split? ALL things sold taxed 
at the same rate in your jurisdiction? That would not be true for other 
users. Simple rate? Or something odd for fractions of a dollar (every 
state I've lived in with a sales tax had special rules for that).

USUALLY business systems designed to handle sales have a component that 
does this, usually called a POS (point of sales) component and THAT 
generates transactions which feed the general ledger program << POS 
would also produce feeds to the inventory system >> Gnucash is JUST 
"general ledger". Personally I think that there should be teams working 
on these other sorts of systems (to have an open source POS, and open 
source "inventory", etc.). However it is important to note that POS 
systems are often sold by the same company that sells the register 
(doing things like keeping track of cash, producing customer receipts, 
etc.). Might be far fetched to expect one of these outfits to produce 
something to feed gnucash << but here could sit an open source program 
to CONVERT the output to what gnucash wanted >>

Michael D Novack