GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 542632
Display amounts in scheduled transaction list
Last modified: 2018-06-29 22:07:25 UTC
In the scheduled transaction tab you display items like name, frequency, last and next occurrence. It would be extremely useful to also display the amount. In addition it would be good to display the amounts still owing for the month and year.
Josh may know better, but I doubt there is a generic way to extract an amount of a scheduled transaction. You might do that if the template consists of only one transaction involving only two accounts, similar to the basic ledger mode in registers. But even then the transaction may be multi-currency (or -commodity), so this amount would be displayed in your report currency[, if possible]. I would propose to put enough information into the transaction name to differentiate it from similar ones. Suggesting WONTFIX.
Andreas and Josh, I'm new to GC and forgive me if I'm a little green on the code. I have done a little looking around in the SQLite file and familiarized myself with how scheduled transactions work (at least from the data file perspective). As the Development Wiki page mentions, it's good to have people coming over from other software. I'm a fan of FOSS but a long time Quicken user. I've just recently made the jump to GC and the scheduled transactions section stands out to me as one thing needing the most help from a usability standpoint. I'm also well aware of the general "X is not Y" mantra - Linux is not Windows, for example. I wouldn't want to make GC into Quicken - it's not Quicken and shouldn't be. Some of the "user friendliness" functions should be looked at though when possible. There are a few scheduled transaction things that I miss most from Quicken, and they're all addressed already in Bugzilla. This is one of them. I personally don't mind the way the frequency is displayed (reminds me a little of cron), but the amount and dates would be helpful. The dates are easy to determine and I've already written SQLite queries to find that out. The challenge for writing this code is, as you said, the transaction can be VERY complex. My paycheck accounts for 10 different transactions at least, where several debits and credits are made for taxes, 401(k) contribution, medical plan, etc. This was also true in Quicken. The biggest challenge in reporting the amount is how to pick the account which should be reported upon. For a mortgage, you probably want to see the impact to your checking account. For a paycheck, probably the same. It's impossible for GC to guess, though, for scenarios like my paycheck where three "BANK" type accounts are hit. Quicken just displayed one account, and I can't remember why it chose that one. I can look, but I believe you chose which was the "main" account on a scheduled transaction. Maybe a user preference can be stored per transaction to show which split/account should be displayed in the amount field? It might need to be a new slots entry and/or type to avoid breaking the data file for backwards compatibility. I have no experience with the GC source and VERY minimal with Linux/GTK programming, but I'd like to help improve the scheduled transactions if I can. I'd say I'm fairly competent in C. I don't know Scheme but I'm adaptable. Like almost everyone, time is at a premium and can't set any promise dates. I do plan to grab the source and compile next week just to make sure I can get that far; beyond that, any pointers into where I should start looking in the code would be appreciated.
I believe that Bug 552987 is a duplicate of this bug.
*** Bug 552987 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Thanks for taking the time to report this. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 647343 ***
GnuCash bug tracking has moved to a new Bugzilla host. This bug has been copied to https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=542632. Please update any external references or bookmarks.