Proposed GnuCash Extensions

The following are proposals for various, as-yet-unimplemented enhancements.

The goal of this document is to understand some of the changes that will come soon to the interfaces.

Accounting Periods

Accounting periods are implemented by creating an object that describes the accounting period, and then assigning every transaction to at least one period.

typedef struct _accountingPeriod {
        GUID guid;           // id
    char *name;          // user-selectable name
    int kind;            // enum {none, week, month, quarter, year }
    Timespec * start_date;   //
    Timespec * end_date;
        AccountGroup  *topgrp;  // chart of accounts for this period.
} AccountingPeriod;

The Transaction struct has to be extended with a period guid. Every transaction can belong to at most one accounting period.

In addition, each chart of accounts needs to be extended with an accounting period as well. This allows 'old' accounts to be deleted from 'open books', without having to delete that same account from old closed books. Basically, a new chart of accounts needs to be written out/read from the engine for each new accounting period.

The xaccPeriodClose() subroutine performs the following:

• crawl over all transactions and mark them as being part of this accounting period (actually, new transactions should by default be getting put into the currently open period...)
• find the equity account (what if there is more than one equity account ?? what if equity has sub-accounts ?? )
• transfer all income/expense to equity (shouldn't the equity account match the income/expense hierarchy?)
• return a new account group with new opening balances ...

Changes to Transaction Structure

Add an accounting period guid (see above).

Changes to Journal Entry (Split) Structure

Voucher Reference

Add a char * voucher; This is a generic id string that somehow identifies the piece of paper/electronic document(s) that indicate where/how to find the paper trial for this entry. This list of id's should probably be a list of key-value pairs, where the keys & values can be completely configured by the user, and hold the needed data that the user wants to store. For the SQL backend, this is a key to a user-definable table.

Additional Banking Info

BankId – routing & transit number (US) or Bankleitzan (DE) or Banque (FR) BranchID – Agence (FR), blank for other countries

AcctKey – Cle (FR), blank in others

Account type enumerants: bank account types: checking, savings, moneymarket, creditline, cma (cash amangement account)