Re: Order of transactions
I'm not sure how it works in Quicken. I was referring to just sorting by the date of entry, not changing it. But now that I think of it, if we switch to sorting by the date of entry, we could go ahead and show the date of entry in the left column instead of the 'real' date typed in, and allow the user to edit that. Any thoughts about that? Unfortunately, if you happen to edit the date-typed-in by mistake, there is no way of finding the error by looking for recently entered (or recently changed) transactions. Also, if the date-changed is to be used for audit, it won't be much use if it is easy to change. Also, it we are to be doing audits, it would be useful to retain the old transactions after a change -- not so that they would be actively displayed and added into totals and such, but that they could be found and used to check whether the change was correct (or, possibly, to restore the old version if the change were wrong). Also, if we are going to be doing all this, we should record the name of the person making the change. In Linux, would a numerical user-id be sufficient? -- hendrik.
Re: Order of transactions
On Thu, 11 May 2000, Hendrik Boom wrote: Unfortunately, if you happen to edit the date-typed-in by mistake, there is no way of finding the error by looking for recently entered (or recently changed) transactions. The only "edit" should be to set it to "now". Also, if the date-changed is to be used for audit, it won't be much use if it is easy to change. Also, if we are to be doing audits, it would be useful to retain the old transactions after a change I don't think that this is the appropriate place to retain an audit trail. That is already handled by the logging functions. Also, if we are going to be doing all this, we should record the name of the person making the change. YES. In any multi-user situation, this is often a requirement. In Linux, would a numerical user-id be sufficient? If you mean to automatically derive it from the running process, NO. The current process may be a proxy for multiple users. If we are using this feature, it should be able to be either automatic or require an authentication login process.(configurable). In either case, the id should be presented as a short alpha string. The storage in the JE could be a small integer index but that is something best hidden from the interface.
Re: Order of transactions
Great! I've always wanted this feature in Quicken, but I didn't know it existed. This would be very helpful when you realize that a transaction you could swear you just entered has disappeared, and you're not sure if you haven' t entered it yet or if you used the wrong date on the transaction. It's a pain to track it down to correct the date. So how does this feature work in Quicken? And how will this work in Gnuc ash? I'm not sure how it works in Quicken. I was referring to just sorting by the date of entry, not changing it. But now that I think of it, if we switch to sorting by the date of entry, we could go ahead and show the date of entry in the left column instead of the 'real' date typed in, and allow the user to edit that. Any thoughts about that? I was also referring to a method of selecting the sort order. Using your method means that the time of day would have to be added to the date field when displaying the entry date. That could be confusing, especially when many transactions could have the same time down to the second (as with entries from a qif file). It might be simplest to just sort by entry date, but don't bother trying to edit it, or even display it. That's a good point. I have the new sort order done, but DNS troubles downstream are preventing me from getting to the CVS server. I'll commit it, and the patches others have sent me, as soon as things are sorted out. dave
Re: Order of transactions
I was just discovering that I cannot control the placement of an "adjust balance" transaction in an account; if there are any other transactions on that day I cannot predict where it will fall or what it will leave the account balance. How is this supposed to be used? -- Randolph Fritz Eugene, Oregon, USA
Re: Order of transactions
[Resent--I misdirected this the first time.] -- Randolph Fritz Eugene, Oregon, USA On Tue, May 02, 2000 at 11:00:05PM -0500, John Hasler wrote: But you do have that control, don't you? They should stay in the order you enter them in unless you give them dates and/or numbers that will cause them to be sorted differently. M...the problem is that if I make a mistake it's difficult to correct it. Once I, for instance, enter a large deposit after a large check, the only way to get the check to show up after the deposit is to delete it and re-enter it. It seems very inflexible. By "irrelevant from an accounting viewpoint" I just meant that you should be free to enter transactions that all have the same date in any order you like: it won't affect your taxes or anything. H. -- Randolph Fritz Eugene, Oregon, USA
Re: Order of transactions
Dave Peticolas wrote: Just to add my voice to the mix: I want to be able to sort my register using time C (Quicken can do this, btw) because when I'm doing my monthly reconcile with the bank stmt, I always end up with a bunch of transactions which I never entered during the month (for whatever reason). This is like John's "box job" above. What I do in Quicken is, after figuring out which ones they are and marking them on the paper stmt from the bank, is enter them all in order. It's very nice to see them in the register in "order entered" order during this process so I can see where I am. If the txns move back to their real dates (dates A or B above) as soon as I enter them it's harder for me to check my work. We already track the date entered, so this is easy to do. I'll add this feature to the next release. Great! I've always wanted this feature in Quicken, but I didn't know it existed. This would be very helpful when you realize that a transaction you could swear you just entered has disappeared, and you're not sure if you haven't entered it yet or if you used the wrong date on the transaction. It's a pain to track it down to correct the date. So how does this feature work in Quicken? And how will this work in Gnucash? Will it involve "unhiding" a new column in the register, or simply a key combination to change the register sort order? And Dave do you ever sleep? Gerald
Re: Order of transactions
Dave Peticolas wrote: Just to add my voice to the mix: I want to be able to sort my register using time C (Quicken can do this, btw) because when I'm doing my monthly reconcile with the bank stmt, I always end up with a bunch of transactions which I never entered during the month (for whatever reason). This is like John's "box job" above. What I do in Quicken is, after figuring out which ones they are and marking them on the paper stmt from the bank, is enter them all in order. It's very nice to see them in the register in "order entered" order during this process so I can see where I am. If the txns move back to their real dates (dates A or B above) as soon as I enter them it's harder for me to check my work. We already track the date entered, so this is easy to do. I'll add this feature to the next release. Great! I've always wanted this feature in Quicken, but I didn't know it existed. This would be very helpful when you realize that a transaction you could swear you just entered has disappeared, and you're not sure if you haven't entered it yet or if you used the wrong date on the transaction. It's a pain to track it down to correct the date. So how does this feature work in Quicken? And how will this work in Gnucash? I'm not sure how it works in Quicken. I was referring to just sorting by the date of entry, not changing it. But now that I think of it, if we switch to sorting by the date of entry, we could go ahead and show the date of entry in the left column instead of the 'real' date typed in, and allow the user to edit that. Any thoughts about that? Will it involve "unhiding" a new column in the register, or simply a key combination to change the register sort order? And Dave do you ever sleep? I'll sleep when I'm dead :) dave
Re: Order of transactions
Great! I've always wanted this feature in Quicken, but I didn't know it existed. This would be very helpful when you realize that a transaction you could swear you just entered has disappeared, and you're not sure if you haven't entered it yet or if you used the wrong date on the transaction. It's a pain to track it down to correct the date. So how does this feature work in Quicken? And how will this work in Gnucash? I'm not sure how it works in Quicken. I was referring to just sorting by the date of entry, not changing it. But now that I think of it, if we switch to sorting by the date of entry, we could go ahead and show the date of entry in the left column instead of the 'real' date typed in, and allow the user to edit that. Any thoughts about that? I was also referring to a method of selecting the sort order. Using your method means that the time of day would have to be added to the date field when displaying the entry date. That could be confusing, especially when many transactions could have the same time down to the second (as with entries from a qif file). It might be simplest to just sort by entry date, but don't bother trying to edit it, or even display it. Given my example above, I would rather not have the transaction date disappear when sorting by entry date. I would like to sort by entry date to help find errors in the transaction date field. When sorted in this mode I would still want to be able to edit the transaction date. Gerald
Re: Order of transactions
"CB" == Christopher Browne [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: CB On 01 May 2000 22:06:07 CDT, the world broke into rejoicing as CB John Hasler [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: Christopher Browne writes: We thus have _three_ times: a) The moment at which you incurred the transaction, b) The moment at which the effects of the transaction hit your bank account and c) The moment at which you typed in the transaction. All three being legitimately different. I would think c) to be the least meaningful of the three. I would think that c) is the most meaningful of the three. It is likely to be the most accurate available record of the date on which you recognized the transaction, and it is the date and time that, when used to sort the transactions, is likely to be least surprising to the user. It is also the only one of three that is always available. CB Sorry, I don't think so. If I go on vacation to Nepal for 2 CB months, and don't get around to entering information 'til I get CB back, the backlog doesn't affect the fact that the two months CB worth of credit card charges hit accounts whilst I was away. CB I've done "box jobs" where _all_ the transactions for the year CB were entered at one time, at the end of the year. When I do CB that, all transactions might be dated on one single day. Just to add my voice to the mix: I want to be able to sort my register using time C (Quicken can do this, btw) because when I'm doing my monthly reconcile with the bank stmt, I always end up with a bunch of transactions which I never entered during the month (for whatever reason). This is like John's "box job" above. What I do in Quicken is, after figuring out which ones they are and marking them on the paper stmt from the bank, is enter them all in order. It's very nice to see them in the register in "order entered" order during this process so I can see where I am. If the txns move back to their real dates (dates A or B above) as soon as I enter them it's harder for me to check my work. But that said, it's the only time I use sort-by-order-entered. All other times (in Quicken) I use sort-by-txn-date. So the upshot is that for me (a home user, not an accountant) both dates (C and either A or B) can be important, depending on what I'm doing. -- Gary Oberbrunner -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Order of transactions
Just to add my voice to the mix: I want to be able to sort my register using time C (Quicken can do this, btw) because when I'm doing my monthly reconcile with the bank stmt, I always end up with a bunch of transactions which I never entered during the month (for whatever reason). This is like John's "box job" above. What I do in Quicken is, after figuring out which ones they are and marking them on the paper stmt from the bank, is enter them all in order. It's very nice to see them in the register in "order entered" order during this process so I can see where I am. If the txns move back to their real dates (dates A or B above) as soon as I enter them it's harder for me to check my work. We already track the date entered, so this is easy to do. I'll add this feature to the next release. dave -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Order of transactions
On Tue, 02 May 2000, Rob Walker wrote: Agreed, as do I. However, I thought we were only talking about journal entries which fell on the same calendar date, no? I would have used different terminology to convey that meaning. I agree that, for JE assigned to the same time interval, order entered is a reasonable default. Another is debits(for assets) first. However, I don't think there is any satisfactory solution that will please everyone. Perhaps we should handle transaction times to higher precision which can be optionally accessed. For example, we might store time in "Unix time" (1 second resolution) but display it only in days. By some special mouse click, we could open a window that allowed us to edit the time to the second. By default, we could enter today's entries as "now" and trose of other days as "noon". The question is "Have we really gained enough to warrant the effort?" -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Order of transactions
On Tue, May 02, 2000 at 06:16:34AM -0500, Richard Wackerbarth wrote: However, I don't think there is any satisfactory solution that will please everyone. For that reason, I think it would probably be best to make it possible for the user to determine the order. -- Randolph Fritz Eugene, Oregon, USA -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Order of transactions
Richard Wackerbarth writes: If I am posting entries from ANY other source, I will use the date recorded in that source. For example, I might normally enter the checks that I write while I am writing them. However, I sometimes use a check for some purpose other than mailing a payment. In that case, I enter the date on the check even if I post it a month later. I am not suggesting that gnucash should ignore a date entered by the user in favor of the current date. -- John Hasler [EMAIL PROTECTED] (John Hasler) Dancing Horse Hill Elmwood, WI -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Order of transactions
Richard Wackerbarth writes: The question is "Have we really gained enough to warrant the effort?" From an accounting viewpoint, the order of entries which all carry the same date is irrelevant in any circumstance in which a gnucash is likely to find herself. -- John Hasler [EMAIL PROTECTED] (John Hasler) Dancing Horse Hill Elmwood, WI -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Order of transactions
Christopher Browne writes: Sorry, I don't think so. If I go on vacation to Nepal for 2 months, and don't get around to entering information 'til I get back, the backlog doesn't affect the fact that the two months worth of credit card charges hit accounts whilst I was away. A special situation. I don't mean to suggest that the current date should override the one you type in. I do contend that it is quite a valuable piece of data and often the only date you have for a transaction, though. As you note, storing it along with the date entered by the user would be useful for auditing. But when the issue is of how to allocate transactions over time, which will include their allocation to particular accounting periods, time of data entry is decidedly _not_ an acceptable measure. Failing to post transactions until several accounting periods have passed is also not very acceptable either (not that we don't do it). I could, if pressed, outline some entertaining _frauds_ that could be implemented via the methodology of not recognizing transactions until they are entered into the computer system. If there exist business documents recording the actual dates of the transactions, then those are the dates on which you recognized the transactions regardless of when you got around to posting them. If there are no such documents then the entry date is the only one there is (you should, of course, keep up on your posting). -- John Hasler [EMAIL PROTECTED] (John Hasler) Dancing Horse Hill Elmwood, WI -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Order of transactions
On Tue, May 02, 2000 at 08:51:17PM -0500, John Hasler wrote: From an accounting viewpoint, the order of entries which all carry the same date is irrelevant in any circumstance in which a gnucash is likely to find herself. Well, my specific problem is that I maintain both a paper and electronic check register. Without control over the order of entries I essentially have to reconcile the two registers. :( Now, maybe this isn't relevant to someone standing in an "accounting viewpoint," but it is relevant to my day-to-day needs. -- Randolph Fritz Eugene, Oregon, USA -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Order of transactions
Randolph Fritz writes: Well, my specific problem is that I maintain both a paper and electronic check register. Without control over the order of entries I essentially have to reconcile the two registers. But you do have that control, don't you? They should stay in the order you enter them in unless you give them dates and/or numbers that will cause them to be sorted differently. By "irrelevant from an accounting viewpoint" I just meant that you should be free to enter transactions that all have the same date in any order you like: it won't affect your taxes or anything. -- John Hasler [EMAIL PROTECTED] (John Hasler) Dancing Horse Hill Elmwood, WI -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Order of transactions
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 -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Order of transactions
On Mon, 01 May 2000, you wrote: 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_? One possibility is to allow different dates on the JEs that make up the transaction. The default would be to use the same date on each JE within the transaction. The ordering would then be to the resolution of the "date" entry. 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... Daily balances should not depend on the ordering of transactions. You are correct that "ordering" is important if you wish to base decisions on the "running" balance. However, I agree that decisions made after the fact should not use gnucash running balances for that purpose. It is still possible to generate the decision based on the daily ending balance which does not depend upon the ordering of entries within that day. -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Order of transactions
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. Doesn't the engine store the transaction time in seconds since 1970? If this is the case, what is the default value used for a transaction when just the date is specified? Is it noon? Midnight? Instead of adding a different set of rules for transactions within a day, would it make sense to use the time within a given day to determine the sort order. Then the engine could take care of the sort order. Default each transaction to occur at noon, and let the user bump transactions forward or backwards a little if necessary to determine the sort order. Of course the time of day information would never need to be entered or displayed by default. Maybe it would only modified by a key combination. Gerald -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Order of transactions
Christopher Browne [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: 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... You are still "accurate" at the end of the day, regardless of what order the txns appear within a day. It really doesn't matter if I have a $200 payment and then a $150 charge, or vice-versa.. At the end of the day, I've got a credit of $50. I suppose if you really want an intra-day max/min then you would care about the order in which txns get posted to your account (in which case, perhaps the order should be the order in which they get posted to the account -- I have no problem with that). What's wrong with just keeping the daily order in which txns get entered? Sure, someone will complain that they want to change the order, but just document that that is not possible. (If it's documented, then it isn't a bug :) -derek -- Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/ PP-ASEL N1NWH [EMAIL PROTECTED]PGP key available -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Order of transactions
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 debi ts first within that day. Doesn't the engine store the transaction time in seconds since 1970? If this is the case, what is the default value used for a transaction when just the date is specified? Is it noon? Midnight? Instead of adding a different set of rules for transactions within a day, would it make sense to use the time within a given day to determine the sort order. Then the engine could take care of the sort order. Default each transaction to occur at noon, and let the user bump transactions forward or backwards a little if necessary to determine the sort order. The problem is that _that_ date/time is _fairly worthless,_ as it represents the time at which the transaction is _entered._ Which could represent a _third_ point in time. We thus have _three_ times: a) The moment at which you incurred the transaction, b) The moment at which the effects of the transaction hit your bank account, and c) The moment at which you typed in the transaction. All three being legitimately different. I would think c) to be the least meaningful of the three. By the way, another moment that I _would_ consider of some value would be the moment at which the split was marked as "reconciled as clear." (To connect this to the other discussion about Reconciliation...) I have had occasion to care about this; with an account that had _hundreds_ of transactions per month, it became a matter of some importance to be able to trace back to know which month the transaction cleared the bank. This was on paper, so what I'd do was to use a different symbol each month to mark items as "reconciled." I could then look back at the books, see which symbol was used, and infer, from that, which bank statement the item came from. It's mostly important when transactions commonly remain outstanding for several months, which isn't particularly important to the average home user. -- cc hello.c, in Canada, results in: eh.oot [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/lsf.html -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Order of transactions
By the way, another moment that I _would_ consider of some value would be the moment at which the split was marked as "reconciled as clear." (To connect this to the other discussion about Reconciliation...) We track that date, sort of. Whenver the reconciliation status of a split is changed, that date is recorded. dave -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Order of transactions
On Mon, 01 May 2000, Christopher Browne wrote: By the way, another moment that I _would_ consider of some value would be the moment at which the split was marked as "reconciled as clear." (To connect this to the other discussion about Reconciliation...) I have had occasion to care about this; with an account that had _hundreds_ of transactions per month, it became a matter of some importance to be able to trace back to know which month the transaction cleared the bank. Just as you mention the 3 different times associated with the entry of a transaction and conclude that "time posted to gnucash" is least valuable, I think the same is true of reconciliation. When you did the reconciliation is much less important than the period for which you are doing the reconciliation. For example, assuming that I just balanced my checkbook year-to-date. Yes, it is sloppy to wait so long, but it happens. Now, just to make matters worse, I balanced my April statement first. Then I did January, etc. When I come back later, I don't care at all that I reconciled that check on May 1. What I want to know is that it cleared the bank in March. This was on paper, so what I'd do was to use a different symbol each month to mark items as "reconciled." Dave Peticolas wrote: We track that date, sort of. How about using the "ending date" of the statement period instead? -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Order of transactions
Christopher Browne writes: We thus have _three_ times: a) The moment at which you incurred the transaction, b) The moment at which the effects of the transaction hit your bank account, and c) The moment at which you typed in the transaction. All three being legitimately different. I would think c) to be the least meaningful of the three. I would think that c) is the most meaningful of the three. It is likely to be the most accurate available record of the date on which you recognized the transaction, and it is the date and time that, when used to sort the transactions, is likely to be least surprising to the user. It is also the only one of three that is always available. -- John Hasler [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dancing Horse Hill Elmwood, Wisconsin -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Order of transactions
On Mon, 01 May 2000, John Hasler wrote: Christopher Browne writes: We thus have _three_ times: a) The moment at which you incurred the transaction, b) The moment at which the effects of the transaction hit your bank account, and c) The moment at which you typed in the transaction. All three being legitimately different. I would think c) to be the least meaningful of the three. I would think that c) is the most meaningful of the three. It is likely to be the most accurate available record of the date on which you recognized the transaction, and it is the date and time that, when used to sort the transactions, is likely to be least surprising to the user. It is also the only one of three that is always available. I think that you are totally wrong. If I am posting entries from ANY other source, I will use the date recorded in that source. For example, I might normally enter the checks that I write while I am writing them. However, I sometimes use a check for some purpose other than mailing a payment. In that case, I enter the date on the check even if I post it a month later. -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Order of transactions
On 01 May 2000 22:06:07 CDT, the world broke into rejoicing as John Hasler [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: Christopher Browne writes: We thus have _three_ times: a) The moment at which you incurred the transaction, b) The moment at which the effects of the transaction hit your bank account and c) The moment at which you typed in the transaction. All three being legitimately different. I would think c) to be the least meaningful of the three. I would think that c) is the most meaningful of the three. It is likely to be the most accurate available record of the date on which you recognized the transaction, and it is the date and time that, when used to sort the transactions, is likely to be least surprising to the user. It is also the only one of three that is always available. Sorry, I don't think so. If I go on vacation to Nepal for 2 months, and don't get around to entering information 'til I get back, the backlog doesn't affect the fact that the two months worth of credit card charges hit accounts whilst I was away. I've done "box jobs" where _all_ the transactions for the year were entered at one time, at the end of the year. When I do that, all transactions might be dated on one single day. It is _certainly_ reasonable to track entry date; that is _highly_ useful from an audit point of view. But when the issue is of how to allocate transactions over time, which will include their allocation to particular accounting periods, time of data entry is decidedly _not_ an acceptable measure. I could, if pressed, outline some entertaining _frauds_ that could be implemented via the methodology of not recognizing transactions until they are entered into the computer system. Tax authorities like the IRS and CCRA would _not_ be pleased with this approach, suffice it to say... -- The way to a man's heart is with a broadsword. [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/lsf.html -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Order of transactions
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. -- Randolph Fritz Eugene, Oregon, USA -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Order of transactions
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? thanks, dave -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Order of transactions
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. rob -- Gnucash Developer's List To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
