Thu, 5 Nov 2015 18:26:22 <1883999.jh6ha8s...@legolas.kobaltwit.lan>
Geert Janssens <geert.gnuc...@kobaltwit.be> wrote...
The part of the patch I'm interested in here now is the part where you
changed code to unconditionally use the start-day-time for the
from-date, where it was using either start-day- time or end-day-time
depending on whether the report is for income/expense or not. Your
patch may be correct, but I don't know because I have no idea why this
distinction was there in the first place. I would like to hear if other
users/devs know this before I apply your patch.
To state the obvious:
Asset, Liability and Equity accounts are usually reported on at a point
in time (nominally a moment before midnight, I don't think we need to
involve time zones here).
Income and Expense accounts are usually reported on over a period in
time, nominally moment after midnight to moment before midnight.
The Net Worth Barchart is (or should be) balance sheet type reporting,
in plain terms the sum of a set of accounts (or a single balance sheet
account) of the users choice at a point in time. And some other point
in time. And another one. And so on. But, to be clear, points in time
for Balance Sheet accounts represented by a bar on a chart.
If my argument holds true the table that goes along with the Net Worth
Barchart will match balance sheets produced for the same time.
Time passes, I've done some spot checks on weekly data from accounts I'm
familiar with that change at least weekly and it holds true.
Does the graph match the table? To test this I hovered my cursor over
bars in the chart and checked if they matched (date and amount) with the
table. Answer: yes, they match.
I'm not seeing a reason for change in terms of what is displayed.
So does anyone know a good reason to use another start time for
income-expense reporting vs other reports ?
Ummm, if the report was about a period of time (Income Statement or
Profit and Loss type reports) rather than a point in time then this
might be something to discuss. As far as I can tell the Net Worth
Barchart is a series of Balance Sheet reports.
It has been like this since 2001 at least when the report was first
introduced as a merger between "income-expense-graph.scm" and
"net-worth-timeseries.scm" [3] by Christian Stimming. The former used
day-start-time, the latter used day-end-time.
Before my time but if appropriate moments are picked there needn't be a
problem per se.
===
Having said all that I'm wondering what the issue for JD is. I think
(but may be wrong) that his moan is about arbitrary human *time periods*
not always matching up.
We should all know that weeks, months and years can be weird if you are
dumb enough to believe in a god or follow a particular government and
prefer their definition of time versus one other humans understand.
Locally, if I use "Step size: week" I get 7 days per step.
Locally if I use "Step size: month" I get a varying number of days.
Why? Because the fuckers that made up months in the centuries before
anyone reading this was born made months arbitrary numbers of days long
depending on whether they'd recently killed someone, had sex or won a
war or similar stuff. To put this in context we didn't change the
months of the year for WW1 or WW2 when lots of people died more
recently.
So, easy way out? Use the first of the month not the last day as your
accounting day and if you are a slave use the day before that.
gnc does months well and you get to poke officialdom in the eye because
you are doing it right - there cannot be a more correct measure of a
month than from 1st of one to 1st of the next, surely, even though the
number of days vary? :)
Months don't even make sense as investing periods, Feb non leap year vs
a 31 day month is silly. Months that include holidays vs months that
don't, similarly silly.
JD, go for weeks is my advice.
I'm going to need persuading that gnc should accommodate all varying
length months and strongly suggest it shouldn't even attempt the
variances because that way is the path to hell [1]
[1] in the sense that as soon as you agree one weird calendar their
opponents will say you have to include theirs too and before you know it
the dumb shits will start killing each other and it will all be our
fault.
Geert
[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=757637
[2] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=639049
[3] https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/commit/e8a5a9677cfb0a1eaa7
Please don't block this, Liz. Mildly intelligent people should read it.
--
Wm...
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