Bill Gribble wrote... g> There are several major personal finance features, including budgeting g> and scheduled transactions, that got dropped from the 2.0 release g> which we want to have as a gnucash-2.2 update as soon as possible; g> that means realistically 4-6 developer-months of additional time. In all the (recently sparse) discussion of budgeting and scheduled transactions, people seem to like to lump scheduled transactions in with budgeting. I still think this is a mistake. Budgeting is a big scary complex subsystem which many people will not use at all, whereas scheduled transactions can be a pretty straightforward affair which is more broadly applicable. Basic scheduled transaction support could consist of... 1. UI for creating scheduled transactions. 2. Incorporating scheduled transactions in the register. 3. UI for converting "scheduled" to "entered" transactions. To elaborate a bit... 1. UI for creating scheduled transactions. My suggestion: a new entry "Repeat..." could be added to the right-click menu for transactions in the register. When "Repeat..." is selected, a simple dialog would ask the user to specify the starting date, how often (annual/quarterly/monthly/semimonthly/ biweekly/weekly), and how many times (default: indefinite). There should also be a checkbox for "record automatically". The wording needs work. 2. Incorporating scheduled transactions in the register. In the general configuration dialog, there should be an entry field for the number of days in advance that scheduled transactions should begin to appear in the register. When opening a register window, GnuCash would check whether any scheduled transactions should occur within the specified window into the future, and add any to the register which have not been added previously. A new reconcile status (maybe "N") would be used to indicate that these transactions are only scheduled and have not yet occurred, unless the user had checked "record automatically" when scheduling the transaction. 3. UI for converting "scheduled" to "entered" transactions. In the right-click menu for a transaction with "N" in its reconcile field, a new option "Enter..." would change the Reconcile field to the default for entered, uncleared transactions. My guess is that someone working on this full-time could pull it off in a week. Of course, talk is cheap... unfortunately, I haven't had much time to contribute to development. But I have been thinking about it. As I mentioned in a previous message, scheduled transactions are the feature that got me thinking about switching from Quicken, and the feature that has kept me from switching so far. I suspect that I am not alone in this regard. -- Aaron Peromsik | For thinner oatmeal, add more water. [EMAIL PROTECTED] | For thicker oatmeal, add less water. _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gnumatic.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
