On Sat, 29 Apr 2000 22:01:08 PDT, the world broke into rejoicing as
Rob Walker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> On Sat, Apr 29, 2000 at 12:52:06AM -0700, Dave Peticolas wrote:
> > > Is there any way to control the order of transactions within a day?
> > > With my check register, I get situations where gnucash sometimes posts
> > > large withdrawals before deposits, resulting in apparent negative
> > > checking balances.
> >
> > Right now the order is hard-coded. What sort of control
> > were you looking for?
>
> does it right now go in the order they were entered? What about adding an
> optional ordering within each day, where put either the credits or the debits
> first within that day.
I _moderately_ oppose this; I somewhat oppose _any_ imposition of
order within any given day, because that allows the gentle users to
get pathologically interested in which order the transactions fall in.
The _bad_ thing about this is that if you provide a "fixed" order,
then the users may want to be able to _CONTROL_ that order.
The control is quite worthless, in all but one case, as it is _generally_
going to be the case that GnuCash is _loosely_ tracking what is happening
in someone's bank account.
By loosely, I mean that GnuCash is not likely to be the authoritative
source of information on it.
Discrepancies would include:
-> I enter a credit card transaction where I bought something on
April 25th. But it didn't get posted to the account until the 29th,
because the store was a bit slow in submitting slips.
-> I issue a cheque on March 15th, which goes in the mail on the 16th,
arrives at the destination on the 20th, where it sits in the mailbox
for 3 days, sits on someone's desk for 2 weeks, gets deposited to
_their_ account April 13th, and then doesn't clear my account until
April 25th. What date do we put on _that_?
The exception to this would be if you have an accounts receivable
account, and intend to charge interest based on daily balances. It
may be necessary to have an unambiguous ordering of this, particularly
if the rate depends somehow on minimum/maximum balances. I suggest
that GnuCash Probably Doesn't Want To Go There...
At any rate, there's no "best" policy for handling this. If there is
to be _any_ such sorting, it should be configurable at runtime.
--
Why do kamikaze pilots wear helmets?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] - <http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>
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