GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 168700
Canadian mortgage rates are not easily usable in gnucash
Last modified: 2018-06-29 20:50:31 UTC
In the SX editor and Loan/Mortgage Druid, there is an assumption about american-style mortgage rates that makes using the "official" rate given by any canadian bank difficult if you don't know how to do the math. The reason is that posted Canadian rates for mortgages are compounded semi-annually, although the actual interest itself is compounded monthly or biweekly or whatever based on your payment period. There is a way to convert the canadian loan to an effective periodic rate, just as a US rate is simply divided by the number of periods. However, this is compicated and non intuitive to the end-user. On the long run, it would be good to actually improve the SX Editor/Druid so that it can generate the proper formulas by itself, but a first step is to add basic scheme code so that users can manually enter the needed formula if required. I also have issues with rounding where the two components of a mortgage repayment (Int+Principal) don't match the payment, typically by one cent.
Created attachment 38027 [details] [review] Patch to fix this bug for canadian mortgages, at the scheme level This is a patch that defines 4 functions to deal with cpd interest, with builtin rounding, although the comments added in the source file explain how to get either the rounding without the compounded, or the compounded without the rounding. All exisitng functions were left untouched, so no compatibility issues are expected. This only adds 4 new functions to the gnc: scope, so that they are visible in the SX editor. No GUI code code added at this point.
Added PATCH keyword
Applied to trunk, r15452; 2.2.
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