[GNC] GnuCash and Swedish accounting legislation

John Ralls jralls at ceridwen.us
Sun Aug 9 23:24:06 EDT 2020



> On Aug 9, 2020, at 3:59 PM, Stan Brown <the_stan_brown at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> 
> 
> On 2020-08-09 11:58, John Ralls wrote:
> 
>>> On Aug 9, 2020, at 11:04 AM, Stan Brown <the_stan_brown at fastmail.fm> wrote:
>>> You probably know this, but just on the off chance that you don't:
>>> 
>>> In the File » Properties dialog, there is a setting "Day threshold for
>>> read-only transactions." If change the default 0 in that box to a
>>> number, then transactions more than that many days before today can't be
>>> edited.
>>> 
>>> It would be a lot more useful if we could set a date, in my opinion, but
>>> it's better than nothing.
> 
>> Really? ISTM that would be painful to use because you'd have to frequently change the date. I could understand if you wanted to be able to set a period selector, e.g. all transactions before the beginning of the current month are read-only.
> 
> This may be a matter of different users having different use cases.
> 
> Mine is straightforward (to me): Following Adrien's recommendation, I
> don't actually close each month. But I want to make sure that I don't
> inadvertently fumble the date of a new transaction and put it into last
> month, or accidentally change a transaction of last month because of an
> errant mouse click.
> 
> As GC is set up now, to achieve that I would have to change the number
> of days every day, which is, as you say, painful. If I could just setO
> "no alterations of anything dated 2020-07-31 or earlier", that would be
> quite simple, and I'd only have to change it once a month.
> 
> What's your use case for setting number of days, if you're willing to say?
> 
> (I'm not suggesting removing the number-of-days setting, if there's any
> reasonable chance someone actually wants it. But surely it would not be
> hard to add a "freeze transactions before specified date" setting, and
> unless I miss my guess it would prove to be more popular.)

I don't personally have a use-case for the number of days, but I think that it's pretty obvious: Once a transaction is N days old it's considered committed and shouldn't be changed, and transactions should be entered within those same N days of happening in the real world. It's pretty much the topic of this thread.

I think my proposal--using relative dates like beginning of the current month--fits your use case perfectly and would save you the annoyance of having to update the specified date every month and the risk of possibly forgetting.

Regards,
John Ralls



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