I have a foot in both the physicist and accounting camps having spent most of my working life as a professional physicist and then doing accountancy after an enforced early retirement as a result of government cutbacks in science/education.
The clearest definition of split is really in the data structures in the code. A lot of people have struggled with describing what a split is in the documentation. The docs are also largely written by a team of users many of whom are business owners or just manage their personal finances. There are a few of us with a more formal background who also contribute at times. It is hard to balance a more formal description that requires you to have done an accountancy course before you can read it and something that makes sense to someone without that background. I agree that "Split" is a GnuCash specific term. I struggled with use of it initially as it did not correspond with what I was familiar with in my accounting text books which did not assign any name to the various components of a transaction. I personally would have preferred something like transaction component. To say however that it is unrelated to accountancy is however unwarranted. In accountancy to satisfy the accounting equation, any transaction must involve debits and credits to two or more accounts where the total sum of the debits and credits for a transaction is zero. GnuCash uses the term "split" to describe those individual components of a transaction. This is outlined in the Tutorial and Concepts Guide. As a name for the internal data structre "TransactionComponent" is probably a bit long winded back in the days when auto completeion was not very common in IDE's so the developers named it internally as a Split. It is also used within the documentation to refer to the representations of the information contained in the Split data structures within the registers as individual lines, which is most likely a carry over from early discussions between users and the developers. A formal minimal definition of a split would likely consist of an account to be debited or credited, an amount of the debit or credit and whether that amount is being debited or credited to the account. GnuCash and its documentation is not however an accountancy or mathematical textbook, it is a compromise which has to span the knowledge domains of the developers, accountants and users. If you feel the documentation is unclear and you feel you are able to make it clearer by all means join the documentation team but you will find an strongly embedded accpetance of split by the team and the user community - a lot of inertia to overcome. Other programs equally use arcane terms, for example, Quicken's use of "Categories" to describe expense accounts is one that offends my own sensibilities GnuCash is not an abstract mathematical construct. Neither is accountancy. Accountancy is a system for rtecording transactional events in a world of commerce. It has a few embedded, fairly simple, mathematical concepts, but if you were able to describe it in formal mathematical terms it would more than likely be totally unintelligible to the majority of practising accountants and those who need to use it. Luca Pacciola who first recorded the procedures in a mathematical text was a mathematician (Leonardo da Vinci's mathematics tutor) as well as being the son of a Venetian trader engaged in commerce with Arabian North Africa and learned the principles of accounting he espoused from those traders. Some things are simnply a matter of context, As a computer programmer when dealing with binary digital information my brain has no problem recognising k or kilo as 1024. When the context is not binary digital and I am a physicist using SI units, then it is 1000. True this is a problem for those who don't understand the difference between binary digital representations and decimal representations of numbers and do not have the context within which to evaluate it and also use an abbreviation without making absolutely clear its context. A binary Roman would no doubt have severly punished a decimal Arab who shortchanged him by 24 pieces of silver when the agreed price was 1 kilo of silver pieces. Or was he expecting kilograms perhaps?? If you go back far enough in the GnuCash forum archives, you will find many discussions about splits, what they are and mean and what they are not, some informed, some uninformed. One could debate what a split is ad infinitum and an appropriate use of terminology, but I really need to spend time investigating how the importer actually works and where it doesn't do what we would like it to do. The latter is subject to extreme scope creep at times. Cheers David Cousens ----- David Cousens -- Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-User-f1415819.html _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
