gnucash dumping core
I cannot run recent versions of gnucash. cvs co -D "21 mar 2000" gnucash works, but one from the 28th doesn't. I tried looking for the problem, but gnucash doesn't seem to like to run under gdb. Here's a backtrace: #0 0x4055c4b1 in __kill () from /lib/libc.so.6 #1 0x4055c11d in raise () from /lib/libc.so.6 #2 0x40116e56 in gnome_segv_handle () from /usr/lib/libgnomeui.so.32 #3 0x4055c3c8 in __restore () from /lib/libc.so.6 #4 0x400d2bf2 in gnome_app_fill_menu_custom () from /usr/lib/libgnomeui.so.32 #5 0x400d2c6c in gnome_app_fill_menu_custom () from /usr/lib/libgnomeui.so.32 #6 0x400d2941 in gnome_app_fill_menu () from /usr/lib/libgnomeui.so.32 #7 0x806c306 in gnc_register_create_menu_bar (regData=0x820cfe0, statusbar=0x8212478) at window-register.c:1204 #8 0x806ce67 in regWindowLedger (ledger=0x81d0b18) at window-register.c:1493 #9 0x80683e3 in regWindowSimple (account=0x81d9818) at window-register.c:151 #10 0x8065d09 in gnc_account_tree_activate_cb (tree=0x818a5d0, account=0x81d9818, user_data=0x0) at window-main.c:491 #11 0x40333945 in gtk_marshal_NONE__POINTER () from /usr/lib/libgtk-1.2.so.0 #12 0x40360f9d in gtk_handlers_run () from /usr/lib/libgtk-1.2.so.0 #13 0x403603e2 in gtk_signal_real_emit () from /usr/lib/libgtk-1.2.so.0 #14 0x4035e535 in gtk_signal_emit () from /usr/lib/libgtk-1.2.so.0 #15 0x80701b8 in gnc_account_tree_button_press (widget=0x818a5d0, event=0x81f208c) at account-tree.c:794 #16 0x403336e9 in gtk_marshal_BOOL__POINTER () from /usr/lib/libgtk-1.2.so.0 #17 0x4036041b in gtk_signal_real_emit () from /usr/lib/libgtk-1.2.so.0 #18 0x4035e535 in gtk_signal_emit () from /usr/lib/libgtk-1.2.so.0 #19 0x4039373c in gtk_widget_event () from /usr/lib/libgtk-1.2.so.0 ---Type return to continue, or q return to quit--- #20 0x40333642 in gtk_propagate_event () from /usr/lib/libgtk-1.2.so.0 #21 0x4033289a in gtk_main_do_event () from /usr/lib/libgtk-1.2.so.0 #22 0x403de11b in gdk_event_dispatch () from /usr/lib/libgdk-1.2.so.0 #23 0x4040bbc6 in g_main_dispatch () from /usr/lib/libglib-1.2.so.0 #24 0x4040c181 in g_main_iterate () from /usr/lib/libglib-1.2.so.0 #25 0x4040c321 in g_main_run () from /usr/lib/libglib-1.2.so.0 #26 0x403321d9 in gtk_main () from /usr/lib/libgtk-1.2.so.0 #27 0x8064b3f in gnc_ui_main () at top-level.c:242 #28 0x80bd6a8 in gwrap_gnc_ui_main () at gnc.c:4078 #29 0x404f3638 in scm_deval () from /usr/lib/libguile.so.4 #30 0x404f51e5 in scm_dapply () from /usr/lib/libguile.so.4 #31 0x404f0751 in scm_apply () from /usr/lib/libguile.so.4 #32 0x404fdb63 in gh_call0 () from /usr/lib/libguile.so.4 #33 0x80b7b3d in gnucash_main_helper (argc=9, argv=0xb604) at gnucash.c:130 #34 0x404fdc4d in gh_launch_pad () from /usr/lib/libguile.so.4 #35 0x405002a9 in invoke_main_func () from /usr/lib/libguile.so.4 #36 0x4052571b in scm_internal_lazy_catch () from /usr/lib/libguile.so.4 #37 0x4050025b in scm_boot_guile_1 () from /usr/lib/libguile.so.4 #38 0x4049 in scm_boot_guile () from /usr/lib/libguile.so.4 #39 0x404fdc88 in gh_enter () from /usr/lib/libguile.so.4 #40 0x80b7ca5 in main (argc=9, argv=0xb604) at gnucash.c:207 Bryan -- - Bryan Larsen, Senior Software Engineer fall guy Analog Design Automation: Analog Circuit Synthesis? Problem Solved. -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
FreeBSD port in tree
For any FreeBSD users out there. The gnucash port in the FreeBSD tree (deskutils/gnucash) has been updated to version 1.3.4. Matt -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: quicken migration (savings goal)
Lauren Matheson wrote: Hi! I don't use Quicken, so I'm not sure what a savings goal account is. If I understand right, you want to have a certain amount of money by a certain date, and Quicken tells you how much is still missing. So the solution for GnuCash would be a savings account for each savings goal (easy, already existing) and a report that tells you how much is missing (yet to be done). Herbert. -- Herbert Thoma FhG-IIS A, Studio Department Am Weichselgarten3, 91058 Erlangen, Germany Phone: +49-9131-776-323 Fax: +49-9131-776-399 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] www: http://www.iis.fhg.de/ -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: quicken migration
Herbert Thoma wrote: I don't use Quicken, so I'm not sure what a savings goal account is. If I understand right, you want to have a certain amount of money by a certain date, and Quicken tells you how much is still missing. So the solution for GnuCash would be a savings account for each savings goal (easy, already existing) and a report that tells you how much is missing (yet to be done). Herbert. The idea of savings goals in Quicken is that they are 'virtual' accounts, in that they are money that you are setting aside in your mind for a purpose, but there is no 'real' transaction happening. ie, I want to save $5000 for tuition for the next year. Each month when I recieve my pay cheque of $1000 I deposit it to a bank account and set aside $500 of it in my mind as savings for the next school year. So, while my bank account may have $2600 in it, $1500 may already be set aside so really only $600 is 'available' to me to spend. The reporting/reminding part is a secondary bonus - could be helpful, but not necessary for the underlying idea. Scott Haug wrote: My account structure looks something like this: + Cash On Hand + Bank Accounts - Checking - Savings - Certificate of Deposit + Savings Goals - Honeymoon - European Vacation + ... + ... I'm not sure why you would treat it as a liability, but to be honest I have no accounting background so maybe that is the best way. I just treat my savings goals as bank accounts. They're merely logical accounts used to meet a certain monetary goal, and since the money in a savings goal doesn't actually leave the physical account it was transferred from, I still consider it an asset and "Cash On Hand." I basically treat a savings goal as a logical holding account so that I don't try to spend those funds. How do you transfer money into the savings goal though? Would that be with transactions from each of your bank accounts? What I was thinking was that if you use a: + Cash On Hand + Bank Accounts +Checking - Savings Goals + ... ... + Savings Goals - Honeymoon ... Then the Checking account could match your bank statements line by line without savings goal transactions in the way, and then transactions to allocate amounts of money from Checking towards a goal could be made from the Checking:Savings Goals to the appropriate goal. Savings Goals will have a negative balance reducing the Checking balance shown on the main screen to the balance in the Checking register minus the Savings Goals. What is your reasonng for making them liabilities? Maybe I'm not thinking of a savings goal in the same way you are. Plus, it's been awhile since I actually used one in quicken, so I might not remember correctly how they worked there. Perhaps you could refresh me? The idea of making them liabilities was that that is money that you 'owe yourself' or 'owe' to a specific goal. Since there really isn't any transaction taking place when you allocate money to a goal it seems wrong to me to enter one in a real asset or bank account. Lauren. -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: quicken migration
Scott Haug [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I'm not sure why you would treat it as a liability, but to be honest I have no accounting background so maybe that is the best way. I just treat my savings goals as bank accounts. They're merely logical accounts used to meet a certain monetary goal, and since the money in a savings goal doesn't actually leave the physical account it was transferred from, I still consider it an asset and "Cash On Hand." But if you really are transferring the money in gnucash from a bank account to a savings account, how can you reconcile with your bank statement each month? Those transfers will never show up in the bank statement, and so the balance will always be wrong, or am I missing something? If I'm right, then to do "savings goals", we'd probably need another abstraction. Maybe you'd have a "real balance", used for reconciliation, that ignores savings goal transfers, and then the "normal balance" that gnucash shows you by default that includes the savings goal transfers. This would probably require a new account type and some ugly, and possibly incorrect, monkeying around in the engine. Not sure off the top of my head... -- Rob Browning [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930 -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: quicken migration
Hello. Just wondering what the consensus is for migrating savings goal accounts. One idea I have I'm not clear what a savings goal account is, but it sounds like a budgeting issue. Does it make sense to represent budgets as accounts? -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: gnucash dumping core
I cannot run recent versions of gnucash. cvs co -D "21 mar 2000" gnucash works, but one from the 28th doesn't. I tried looking for the problem, but gnucash doesn't seem to like to run unde gdb. What about current CVS? dave -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: quicken migration
I've been thinking about budgeting issues for a while, since I have never found a financial application with the budgeting implemented in a clean way. To me, a budget amounts to specifying the "velocity of money". By that, I mean that you are specifying the flow per unit time which is going into various expense accounts. For instance, as you work at your job, you are paid so much per hour (or for the salaried among us, per year). This is then *your money*, except that your company hasn't gotten around to paying you yet. So in my mind the budget account Salary has a money "velocity" associated with it. You tell the program that you're going to receive 36,000 / year and at the end of January, and the program automatically deposits ~$100 / day into that account. That way it makes sense when the program transfers money from the Salary account into the budget account. The money didn't come from nowhere, but came as a result of the "integration" (for you math geeks) of the velocity of the money over the correct period of time. It works the same way with expenses. As you use electricity, you owe the electric company money at the rate you use the electricity. So your Utilities:Electricity account gets debited at a certain rate. When you get a bill, you (hopefully) bring that balance back to zero by depositing money into it. Bringing it back to the discussion about the honeymoon account, you know that you want $5000 on December 15. So you plug in that planned expense into your account, and specify how you would like to save for it (evenly from now until then, or maybe ramping up in the last couple of months because there are other expenses which will end by then). The program computes the budgeting function, and at each day, your balance becomes more and more negative, until you put money into it (or maybe the program could do this automatically). The object is to keep your expense/income accounts at $0. This then brings us back to the question about reconciling the accounts. If you were to transfer money inside GnuCash, then it would become difficult to reconcile your accounts, as has been pointed out in previous emails. The subaccount solution is in some sense suboptimal because you might have multiple accounts (investment and savings) and use multiple of them to save for the honeymoon. Because this is the case, what is necessitated is an idea of budgeting transactions versus actual transactions. When you get a paycheck, all of it gets deposited into your checking account, but then you can make a "budgeting transfer" to the honeymoon account, postdated to the date of your honeymoon. If you later break off your engagement and decide to spend your money on a car, you can make a budgeting transfer from the honeymoon account to the car account. This feature makes budgeting priority changes easier to deal with. If you had an unexpected car breakdown, you could decide to put off that vacation by transferring money out of that account and into the car repair account. You could view your accounts "with budgeting transactions" or "without budgeting transactions". Of course this would necessitate painful changes to the engine, but could result in a very clean budgeting framework for future financial planning functions. Of course budgeting could be done in a report framework, but as was pointed out, the psychological matter of seeing negative balances helps many to do better planning. -Patrick Baker On Thu, 30 Mar 2000, Scott Haug wrote: On Thu, Mar 30, 2000 at 12:28:15PM -0600, Rob Browning wrote: Scott Haug [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I'm not sure why you would treat it as a liability, but to be honest I have no accounting background so maybe that is the best way. I just treat my savings goals as bank accounts. They're merely logical accounts used to meet a certain monetary goal, and since the money in a savings goal doesn't actually leave the physical account it was transferred from, I still consider it an asset and "Cash On Hand." But if you really are transferring the money in gnucash from a bank account to a savings account, how can you reconcile with your bank statement each month? Those transfers will never show up in the bank statement, and so the balance will always be wrong, or am I missing something? Having a "wrong" balance is kind of the point. Its not a real account, its a virtual or logical account set up so you can "set aside" money for a large purchase or debt, such as a vacation or school tuition. The balance reflected in a goal account should indicate to yourself, "that money shouldn't be used for anything else", and having the goal account's balance factored into the bank account's balance helps to achieve that. I don't know about anyone else, but I have a pavlovian reaction when I see a negative balance in my personal financial app, even if I know I have a positive balance
Re: quicken migration
(perceived) smaller balance without any fuss. The only minor downside of this method is that for it to be most effective, these goal accounts must be tied to a single bank account, whereas a separate, standalone goal account could receive transfers from any bank account. But I believe its worth it for not having to mess with it come reconcilation time. Actually, you are able to have goals that are not tied to a specific account. Each account has only one sub account called "Savings Goals" which is used to enter transactions with the set of Savings Goal Liability accounts. So if you have a savings goal of "vacation" then this is the liability account "Savings Goals:Vacation" which may have transactions from "Chequing:Savings Goals" and "Savings:Savings Goals". The liability account will reflect the amount allocated from all accounts. Lauren. -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: quicken migration
Have you looked at budget-report.scm yet? Right now it's at a proof of concept stage, but I think I've proved my concept. Expenditures are *discrete* events. I do not see the difference betweeen your "velocity of money" approach and Quicken/MSMoney's approaches. The only difference is that your base time period is much smaller (1 day rather than 1 month). Over the long term, your approach works, but in the short term it falls down. With my prototype budget report, you can ask it for a budget report for any arbitrary period, and it will give you a real answer on whether you are spending too much or too little. For example, it knows that you are paid on the 1st of the month, or on a Friday every 2 weeks. If you have a 17 day budget report that encompasses two pay periods, there should be 2*pay in your budget, not 17*pay/14. Other expenses occur fairly regularly, but not on a known date. I fill up my car for $18 approximately every 6 weeks (gotta love diesels). If I ask for a report for the last 9 weeks, there should be either 1 or 2 fill ups, not 1.5 fill ups, so $18 is under budget and $36 is over budget. It's still possible to trick the system. For example, a 5.9 week report would consider $36 over budget. No big deal -- you know your tank is full, so you aren't worried. Conversely, a 6.1 week report where you didn't spend anything on fuel, but your tank is empty. Extraordinary/contingency expenses are handled very similarly, but are handled slightly differently. If you set up the above diesel expense as a contingency instead, a 9 week budget report would have a lower limit of $9 and an upper limit of $45. ($18/6 * 9 +/- $18) The idea is that you can be hit with the full amount of the contingency expense at any time, so you should always have $18 "saved". Obviously you don't balance your budget for weird periods. You should balance your budget over the least common multiple of all of the periods. If that means you need a ten year budget, so be it. You're obviously not going to follow the same budget for ten years, but the fact that the budget balances for the full ten year period means that it balances for the current year as well. This all works pretty sweet. One thing I'm looking forward to seeing is a DAILY graph of the budget balance that doesn't swing wildly as large expected expenses hit. Does this make sense to everyone? Bryan On Thu, 30 Mar 2000, Patrick Baker wrote: I've been thinking about budgeting issues for a while, since I have never found a financial application with the budgeting implemented in a clean way. To me, a budget amounts to specifying the "velocity of money". By that, I mean that you are specifying the flow per unit time which is going into various expense accounts. For instance, as you work at your job, you are paid so much per hour (or for the salaried among us, per year). This is then *your money*, except that your company hasn't gotten around to paying you yet. So in my mind the budget account Salary has a money "velocity" associated with it. You tell the program that you're going to receive 36,000 / year and at the end of January, and the program automatically deposits ~$100 / day into that account. That way it makes sense when the program transfers money from the Salary account into the budget account. The money didn't come from nowhere, but came as a result of the "integration" (for you math geeks) of the velocity of the money over the correct period of time. It works the same way with expenses. As you use electricity, you owe the electric company money at the rate you use the electricity. So your Utilities:Electricity account gets debited at a certain rate. When you get a bill, you (hopefully) bring that balance back to zero by depositing money into it. Bringing it back to the discussion about the honeymoon account, you know that you want $5000 on December 15. So you plug in that planned expense into your account, and specify how you would like to save for it (evenly from now until then, or maybe ramping up in the last couple of months because there are other expenses which will end by then). The program computes the budgeting function, and at each day, your balance becomes more and more negative, until you put money into it (or maybe the program could do this automatically). The object is to keep your expense/income accounts at $0. This then brings us back to the question about reconciling the accounts. If you were to transfer money inside GnuCash, then it would become difficult to reconcile your accounts, as has been pointed out in previous emails. The subaccount solution is in some sense suboptimal because you might have multiple accounts (investment and savings) and use multiple of them to save for the honeymoon. Because this is the case, what is necessitated is an idea of budgeting transactions versus actual transactions. When you get a paycheck, all of it gets deposited into
Re: gnucash dumping core
I backed out src/SplitLedger.c, src/register/splitreg.* and I'm back in business. cvs update -Pd -A cvs update -D "26 mar 2000" SplitLedger.c src/register/splitreg.* gets me a version that works. That's odd, because the backtrace you sent bombed out in a place that I wouldn't think would be affected by that code. What version of gtk+ and gnome-libs do you have? dave -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: gnucash dumping core
I cannot run recent versions of gnucash. cvs co -D "21 mar 2000" gnucash works, but one from the 28th doesn't. I tried looking for the problem, but gnucash doesn't seem to like to run unde gdb. What problems do you have running under gdb? dave -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
cvs 2000-03-30
CVS has been updated. New Stuff: + Richard Wackerbarth's patch to the gnc-prices stock fetcher. dave -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: quicken migration
Expenditures are *discrete* events. I do not see the difference betweeen your "velocity of money" approach and Quicken/MSMoney's approaches. The only difference is that your base time period is much smaller (1 day rather than 1 month). Over the long term, your approach works, but in the short term it falls down. The reason I was thinking more about this approach than a report scenario is because I don't tend to do a budget reconciliation at a particular time of year. I would like more of a continuous approach, and thus took the logical extreme in considering a velocity rather than looking at discrete transactions. I admit that it's a unfamiliar way of looking at things, and if it is not obvious to most then it should not be implemented. I also was thinking about my approach because it's nice to have the expense accounts show how much you're allowed to spend at a particular moment in time, rather than the amount already spent from an aribitrary date when you started keeping track. Integrating budgeting with accounts then allows you to do things like transfer money between budget accounts if you want to cut back on something in order to do something else. -Patrick Baker With my prototype budget report, you can ask it for a budget report for any arbitrary period, and it will give you a real answer on whether you are spending too much or too little. For example, it knows that you are paid on the 1st of the month, or on a Friday every 2 weeks. If you have a 17 day budget report that encompasses two pay periods, there should be 2*pay in your budget, not 17*pay/14. Other expenses occur fairly regularly, but not on a known date. I fill up my car for $18 approximately every 6 weeks (gotta love diesels). If I ask for a report for the last 9 weeks, there should be either 1 or 2 fill ups, not 1.5 fill ups, so $18 is under budget and $36 is over budget. It's still possible to trick the system. For example, a 5.9 week report would consider $36 over budget. No big deal -- you know your tank is full, so you aren't worried. Conversely, a 6.1 week report where you didn't spend anything on fuel, but your tank is empty. Extraordinary/contingency expenses are handled very similarly, but are handled slightly differently. If you set up the above diesel expense as a contingency instead, a 9 week budget report would have a lower limit of $9 and an upper limit of $45. ($18/6 * 9 +/- $18) The idea is that you can be hit with the full amount of the contingency expense at any time, so you should always have $18 "saved". Obviously you don't balance your budget for weird periods. You should balance your budget over the least common multiple of all of the periods. If that means you need a ten year budget, so be it. You're obviously not going to follow the same budget for ten years, but the fact that the budget balances for the full ten year period means that it balances for the current year as well. This all works pretty sweet. One thing I'm looking forward to seeing is a DAILY graph of the budget balance that doesn't swing wildly as large expected expenses hit. Does this make sense to everyone? Bryan On Thu, 30 Mar 2000, Patrick Baker wrote: I've been thinking about budgeting issues for a while, since I have never found a financial application with the budgeting implemented in a clean way. To me, a budget amounts to specifying the "velocity of money". By that, I mean that you are specifying the flow per unit time which is going into various expense accounts. For instance, as you work at your job, you are paid so much per hour (or for the salaried among us, per year). This is then *your money*, except that your company hasn't gotten around to paying you yet. So in my mind the budget account Salary has a money "velocity" associated with it. You tell the program that you're going to receive 36,000 / year and at the end of January, and the program automatically deposits ~$100 / day into that account. That way it makes sense when the program transfers money from the Salary account into the budget account. The money didn't come from nowhere, but came as a result of the "integration" (for you math geeks) of the velocity of the money over the correct period of time. It works the same way with expenses. As you use electricity, you owe the electric company money at the rate you use the electricity. So your Utilities:Electricity account gets debited at a certain rate. When you get a bill, you (hopefully) bring that balance back to zero by depositing money into it. Bringing it back to the discussion about the honeymoon account, you know that you want $5000 on December 15. So you plug in that planned expense into your account, and specify how you would like to save for it (evenly from now until then, or maybe ramping up in the last couple of months
Re: quicken migration
On Thu, 30 Mar 2000, Patrick Baker wrote: Expenditures are *discrete* events. I do not see the difference betweeen your "velocity of money" approach and Quicken/MSMoney's approaches. The only difference is that your base time period is much smaller (1 day rather than 1 month). Over the long term, your approach works, but in the short term it falls down. The reason I was thinking more about this approach than a report scenario is because I don't tend to do a budget reconciliation at a particular time of year. I would like more of a continuous approach, and thus took the logical extreme in considering a velocity rather than looking at discrete transactions. I admit that it's a unfamiliar way of looking at things, and if it is not obvious to most then it should not be implemented. Mine's not all that familiar either. I also was thinking about my approach because it's nice to have the expense accounts show how much you're allowed to spend at a particular moment in time, rather than the amount already spent from an aribitrary date when you started keeping track. That's exactly what I want. From my example: if the budget report says that a line item has a lower limit of $18 and an upper limit of $36, and an actual of $14, that means I can blow $4 on anything, and $18 on the line item. Integrating budgeting with accounts then allows you to do things like transfer money between budget accounts if you want to cut back on something in order to do something else. -Patrick Baker In the budget realm, that's simply called adjusting your budget. I've never used the Quicken virtual savings accounts, though. Bryan With my prototype budget report, you can ask it for a budget report for any arbitrary period, and it will give you a real answer on whether you are spending too much or too little. For example, it knows that you are paid on the 1st of the month, or on a Friday every 2 weeks. If you have a 17 day budget report that encompasses two pay periods, there should be 2*pay in your budget, not 17*pay/14. Other expenses occur fairly regularly, but not on a known date. I fill up my car for $18 approximately every 6 weeks (gotta love diesels). If I ask for a report for the last 9 weeks, there should be either 1 or 2 fill ups, not 1.5 fill ups, so $18 is under budget and $36 is over budget. It's still possible to trick the system. For example, a 5.9 week report would consider $36 over budget. No big deal -- you know your tank is full, so you aren't worried. Conversely, a 6.1 week report where you didn't spend anything on fuel, but your tank is empty. Extraordinary/contingency expenses are handled very similarly, but are handled slightly differently. If you set up the above diesel expense as a contingency instead, a 9 week budget report would have a lower limit of $9 and an upper limit of $45. ($18/6 * 9 +/- $18) The idea is that you can be hit with the full amount of the contingency expense at any time, so you should always have $18 "saved". Obviously you don't balance your budget for weird periods. You should balance your budget over the least common multiple of all of the periods. If that means you need a ten year budget, so be it. You're obviously not going to follow the same budget for ten years, but the fact that the budget balances for the full ten year period means that it balances for the current year as well. This all works pretty sweet. One thing I'm looking forward to seeing is a DAILY graph of the budget balance that doesn't swing wildly as large expected expenses hit. Does this make sense to everyone? Bryan On Thu, 30 Mar 2000, Patrick Baker wrote: I've been thinking about budgeting issues for a while, since I have never found a financial application with the budgeting implemented in a clean way. To me, a budget amounts to specifying the "velocity of money". By that, I mean that you are specifying the flow per unit time which is going into various expense accounts. For instance, as you work at your job, you are paid so much per hour (or for the salaried among us, per year). This is then *your money*, except that your company hasn't gotten around to paying you yet. So in my mind the budget account Salary has a money "velocity" associated with it. You tell the program that you're going to receive 36,000 / year and at the end of January, and the program automatically deposits ~$100 / day into that account. That way it makes sense when the program transfers money from the Salary account into the budget account. The money didn't come from nowhere, but came as a result of the "integration" (for you math geeks) of the velocity of the money over the correct period of time. It works the same way with expenses. As you use electricity, you owe the electric
Re: quicken migration
Of course, what I suggested in the last message could probably be simply accounted for by having the budgeting module automatically put a Budgeting Balance transaction, similar to an Opening Balance transaction into every Expense and Income account. The Budgeting Balance would be adjusted every day to account for the increased money allowed for spending. This transaction could be turned on or off by a user interface switch. -Patrick On Thu, 30 Mar 2000, Bryan Larsen wrote: On Thu, 30 Mar 2000, Patrick Baker wrote: Expenditures are *discrete* events. I do not see the difference betweeen your "velocity of money" approach and Quicken/MSMoney's approaches. The only difference is that your base time period is much smaller (1 day rather than 1 month). Over the long term, your approach works, but in the short term it falls down. The reason I was thinking more about this approach than a report scenario is because I don't tend to do a budget reconciliation at a particular time of year. I would like more of a continuous approach, and thus took the logical extreme in considering a velocity rather than looking at discrete transactions. I admit that it's a unfamiliar way of looking at things, and if it is not obvious to most then it should not be implemented. Mine's not all that familiar either. I also was thinking about my approach because it's nice to have the expense accounts show how much you're allowed to spend at a particular moment in time, rather than the amount already spent from an aribitrary date when you started keeping track. That's exactly what I want. From my example: if the budget report says that a line item has a lower limit of $18 and an upper limit of $36, and an actual of $14, that means I can blow $4 on anything, and $18 on the line item. Integrating budgeting with accounts then allows you to do things like transfer money between budget accounts if you want to cut back on something in order to do something else. -Patrick Baker In the budget realm, that's simply called adjusting your budget. I've never used the Quicken virtual savings accounts, though. Bryan With my prototype budget report, you can ask it for a budget report for any arbitrary period, and it will give you a real answer on whether you are spending too much or too little. For example, it knows that you are paid on the 1st of the month, or on a Friday every 2 weeks. If you have a 17 day budget report that encompasses two pay periods, there should be 2*pay in your budget, not 17*pay/14. Other expenses occur fairly regularly, but not on a known date. I fill up my car for $18 approximately every 6 weeks (gotta love diesels). If I ask for a report for the last 9 weeks, there should be either 1 or 2 fill ups, not 1.5 fill ups, so $18 is under budget and $36 is over budget. It's still possible to trick the system. For example, a 5.9 week report would consider $36 over budget. No big deal -- you know your tank is full, so you aren't worried. Conversely, a 6.1 week report where you didn't spend anything on fuel, but your tank is empty. Extraordinary/contingency expenses are handled very similarly, but are handled slightly differently. If you set up the above diesel expense as a contingency instead, a 9 week budget report would have a lower limit of $9 and an upper limit of $45. ($18/6 * 9 +/- $18) The idea is that you can be hit with the full amount of the contingency expense at any time, so you should always have $18 "saved". Obviously you don't balance your budget for weird periods. You should balance your budget over the least common multiple of all of the periods. If that means you need a ten year budget, so be it. You're obviously not going to follow the same budget for ten years, but the fact that the budget balances for the full ten year period means that it balances for the current year as well. This all works pretty sweet. One thing I'm looking forward to seeing is a DAILY graph of the budget balance that doesn't swing wildly as large expected expenses hit. Does this make sense to everyone? Bryan On Thu, 30 Mar 2000, Patrick Baker wrote: I've been thinking about budgeting issues for a while, since I have never found a financial application with the budgeting implemented in a clean way. To me, a budget amounts to specifying the "velocity of money". By that, I mean that you are specifying the flow per unit time which is going into various expense accounts. For instance, as you work at your job, you are paid so much per hour (or for the salaried among us, per year). This is then *your money*, except that your company hasn't gotten around to paying you yet. So in my mind
Re: another bug
Bryan Larsen [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: the qif-import file is only searched for in the installation directory, it is not loaded as specified using the --share-dir option given by the gnucash script. here's my quick hack to go into main.scm (replacing the previous load-path manipulation) Hmm. I'm not sure your hack is "quite right" for the long term. In any case, I also just noticed that there are some other funny business going on with the documentation search path. I'll look into both in a minute. -- Rob Browning [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930 -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: budgets Was: quicken migration
What I've always wanted was a way to relate each transaction to the budget category and period it belongs to. So if I put off paying a bill for a few months (maybe there's a dispute as to the correct amount or something), when I finally do pay it it sould count against the budget period it logically belonged to, not the one in which the payment finally occurred. And it would be wrong to say I had managed to go $1000 under budget simply because I postponed paging a large bill. There would seem to be a planned envelope of spending for each budget period, estimates of committed spemding (which ought to fit within the spending envelope), and actual spending when the cheque is in the mail. I'd like some mechanism that keeps track of all this gracefully. But a savings-goal subaccount is a lovely stopgaps to make one feel worried at the right moments about the big picture. -- hendrik. P.S. Maybe some thing this perverse, but I enjoy the practice we seem to have of quoting the entire discussion in each message. It provides a really convenient, printable summary. And I can delete old messages that have been followed up on so as not to fill up the 20gig hard disk I've just ordered :-). Well, it's not quite perfect; sometimes there are several replies ot one message. :-( Of course, what I suggested in the last message could probably be simply accounted for by having the budgeting module automatically put a Budgeting Balance transaction, similar to an Opening Balance transaction into every Expense and Income account. The Budgeting Balance would be adjusted every day to account for the increased money allowed for spending. This transaction could be turned on or off by a user interface switch. -Patrick On Thu, 30 Mar 2000, Bryan Larsen wrote: On Thu, 30 Mar 2000, Patrick Baker wrote: Expenditures are *discrete* events. I do not see the difference betweeen your "velocity of money" approach and Quicken/MSMoney's approaches. The only difference is that your base time period is much smaller (1 day rather than 1 month). Over the long term, your approach works, but in the short term it falls down. The reason I was thinking more about this approach than a report scenario is because I don't tend to do a budget reconciliation at a particular time of year. I would like more of a continuous approach, and thus took the logical extreme in considering a velocity rather than looking at discrete transactions. I admit that it's a unfamiliar way of looking at things, and if it is not obvious to most then it should not be implemented. Mine's not all that familiar either. I also was thinking about my approach because it's nice to have the expense accounts show how much you're allowed to spend at a particular moment in time, rather than the amount already spent from an aribitrary date when you started keeping track. That's exactly what I want. From my example: if the budget report says that a line item has a lower limit of $18 and an upper limit of $36, and an actual of $14, that means I can blow $4 on anything, and $18 on the line item. Integrating budgeting with accounts then allows you to do things like transfer money between budget accounts if you want to cut back on something in order to do something else. -Patrick Baker In the budget realm, that's simply called adjusting your budget. I've never used the Quicken virtual savings accounts, though. Bryan With my prototype budget report, you can ask it for a budget report for any arbitrary period, and it will give you a real answer on whether you are spending too much or too little. For example, it knows that you are paid on the 1st of the month, or on a Friday every 2 weeks. If you have a 17 day budget report that encompasses two pay periods, there should be 2*pay in your budget, not 17*pay/14. Other expenses occur fairly regularly, but not on a known date. I fill up my car for $18 approximately every 6 weeks (gotta love diesels). If I ask for a report for the last 9 weeks, there should be either 1 or 2 fill ups, not 1.5 fill ups, so $18 is under budget and $36 is over budget. It's still possible to trick the system. For example, a 5.9 week report would consider $36 over budget. No big deal -- you know your tank is full, so you aren't worried. Conversely, a 6.1 week report where you didn't spend anything on fuel, but your tank is empty. Extraordinary/contingency expenses are handled very similarly, but are handled slightly differently. If you set up the above diesel expense as a contingency instead, a 9 week budget report would have a lower limit of $9 and an upper limit of $45. ($18/6 * 9 +/- $18) The idea is that you can be hit with
Re: gnucash dumping core
It's been rumoured that Dave Peticolas said: What problems do you have running under gdb? (this is off-topic, but: there are certain cases (at least in the motif version) where you can deadlock X11 by placing a breakpoint in code that puts up a yes/no dialogue. You can't regain focus in the gdb window, because you have to answer y/n, but clicking on y/n does nothing cause your halted in gdb.) --linas -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: quicken migration
It's been rumoured that Bryan Larsen said: This all works pretty sweet. One thing I'm looking forward to seeing is a DAILY graph of the budget balance that doesn't swing wildly as large expected expenses hit. Well, at least part of the debate of 'velocity' vs. 'discrete events' seems to be about getting that smooth graph. Technically, I think the 'discrete events' aproach is the correct, standard, accredited way of doing things. But that does not mean that there's no way of smoothing things out, espcially when the large bumps are due to expected expenses. What comes to mind is the black sholes equation, although that's a bit of an overkill. As originally applied, it predicts option prices based on stock price, due date volatility. In some way, we can do the same: if we know that we've budgetd $600 every month for e.g. rent, then, if you want to have a smooth graph, it makes sense to 'depreciate' it daily, so that your expenditures graph doesn't have a stairstep in it ever month, and so that your budget graph doesn't have a $600 up spike on rent due date, and an equal down-spike a few days later when youn actually pay the rent. On average, the budget graph should really look pretty flat, if you've budgeted correctly. Don't let the big noisy spikes fool you. --linas -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Note: anyone putting @FOO@ variables in .in files.
In my latest patch, I've changed some of the @FOO@ variables to be auto-expanded in configure.in. If you're using any @FOO@ variables in non-makefiles, please see the new file doc/build-system for how to handle them. The one thing I forgot to mention in that initial version of the file is exactly what you probably need to give the special recursively_expand() treatment. The obvious candidates are any of the *DIR files since those may be defined in terms of other vars like $prefix, but basically any variable that you think could possibly have any $FOO components that a non-makefile wouldn't expand have to be recursively_expanded() in configure.in. Thanks. Night. -- Rob Browning [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930 -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: quicken migration
Linas said: In some way, we can do the same: if we know that we've budgetd $600 every month for e.g. rent, then, if you want to have a smooth graph, it makes sense to 'depreciate' it daily, so that your expenditures graph doesn't have a stairstep in it ever month, and so that your budget graph doesn't have a $600 up spike on rent due date, and an equal down-spike a few days later when youn actually pay the rent. On average, the budget graph should really look pretty flat, if you've budgeted correctly. Don't let the big noisy spikes fool you. If you don't always pay the rent on the same day, categorize your rent as "recurring" rather than "trigger on date". You'll only get a spike if you're 30 days late. And then you deserve one. Bryan -- - Bryan Larsen, Senior Software Engineer fall guy Analog Design Automation: Analog Circuit Synthesis? Problem Solved. -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
impressions
Even though I am the author of one of the reports in the system, I hadn't actually switched over from VMWare+MSMoney to GnuCash until today. Here are some things I noticed: - I cannot seem to delete transactions when in "auto-single" or multi-line mode on the register. - I got a few duplicate transactions on my import. Basically splits that touched two of Money's accounts and one category came in twice -- once properly and once as a transaction between the accounts. I can package up some QIF's if this is not a known problem. They were easy to track down and kill. - Retained Earnings shows up on the balance sheet. No big deal, I suppose. I'll have to look back on the discussion on this one. - documentation is much better than I expected. - I've got one account with a balance that is WAY off. the problem may be that one of the accounts is in USD (everything else is in CAD) When I delete the USD account, the balance seems to be reasonable. - a unified transaction register would be nice. It'd be nice to transfer $5 from cash to lunch and $30 from mastercard to beer in the same window. Myself, I have three accounts I use regularly -- it's a pain to switch beween them. - I've got a sticky date tag on src/SplitLedger.c and src/register/splitreg.* for March 26th. It'd be nice to get that bug fixed before I get too far out of date. (see previous emails.) - reports, especially the budget report I wrote, need a lot of work. :) later, Bryan -- - Bryan Larsen, Senior Software Engineer fall guy Analog Design Automation: Analog Circuit Synthesis? Problem Solved. -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
