2010-06-15 GnuCash IRC logs

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04:50:40 <jo-erlend> I see that people call GNUCash a "Personal finance manager", and similar. Would you say it's more useful for small businesses than larger ones? Who are the typical users?
04:57:50 <gary> i'm a small business user. I have very little incoming/outgoing. I raise something like 3 invoices per month, pay around 4 invoices per month, track my three employees expenses using GNUCash.
04:58:32 <gary> it works more than well enough for me, other than I can't make a logo appear on my invoices :)
04:58:54 <gary> My acountant was happy that it could produce the two reports he needs to do my end of year finances.
04:59:03 <gary> I don't do UK VAT with it yet.
04:59:34 <gary> But when I fiddled with it to try and fo flat rate UK VAT as a test, it seemed simple enough with the tax tables.
04:59:52 <jo-erlend> what about a company with 100 employees, would it still be a useful tool?
04:59:59 <gary> No idea :)
05:00:02 <jo-erlend> :)
05:00:36 <gary> It seems simple enough and has enough documentation for me to muddle my way through my own finances
05:01:03 <gary> I'm not sure how i'd cope if I had 100 employees. Probabyl have to start my own accounts dept if it came to that :)
05:01:41 <gary> Don't see why it wouldn't work. Perhaps consider moving away from the flat file database to a real DB backend or something. But never needed to for my fairly minor needs.
05:03:00 <jo-erlend> mhm.
05:03:38 <gary> warlord might be able to make better suggestions than me though :)
05:05:46 <diakka> anyone have any luck using gnucash with brokerage accounts? I feel like it's really cumbersome
05:09:36 <diakka> i can never get the advanced portfolio report to work right either
05:11:10 <gary> i don't even know what a brokerage account is, sorry :)
05:11:25 <diakka> like stocks
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06:52:20 <kimmo> diakka, I use simple bank account and asset type accounts for those
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07:21:27 <blathijs_> Can anyone clarify for me how "chargeback projects" are supposed to work?
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07:23:06 <blathijs> I can create a new Bill and select a chargeback job for that, but I can't quite find how to use that next
07:24:00 <blathijs> I would expect there to be an option "Auto-create invoice" or something to create an invoice containing all chargeback bills that haven't been invoiced yet or something
07:24:21 <blathijs> or at least have some way to list all bills for a given job
07:24:29 <blathijs> but I haven't been able to find either
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09:23:41 <warlord> jo-erlend: GnuCash is more designed to be a Quickbooks-like replacement for business (and Quicken-like for personal). Would you use something like QB for your 100-person biz? Keep in mind that GnuCash does not do payroll or inventory.
09:24:55 <warlord> diakka: stocks.... can be challenging to handle. in particular you still need to manually enter gains and losses. I think 2.4 will be better.
09:25:04 <jo-erlend> warlord, it doesn't do payroll? But I've seen something about employees in gnucash?
09:26:31 <warlord> blathijs: When you create a bill for the owner of the job the un-invoiced chargeback items get listed, but without checkmarks in the first column. Check that column to include them.
09:26:43 <kimmo> manually entering gains and losses are just peachy for me, as I'm legally required to value stocks at purchase price anyway
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09:26:58 <warlord> note that there was a bug in 2.2.x where all chargeback items for a customer were listed on all invoices. This has been fixed in the 2.3.x series and will be in 2.4
09:27:38 <warlord> jo-erlend: no, it does not do payroll. the 'employee' stuff is more for expense vouchers. doing payroll is *HARD*, what with all the various deductions, taxes, withholdings, etc...
09:28:26 <kimmo> my payroll transaction with 1 employee and me is about 20 splits
09:29:09 <jo-erlend> oh, I see... So there's no problems with using gnucash for payrolls, it just doesn't have anything special for it?
09:29:18 <kimmo> that complexitity multiplied by the number of different payroll/accounting legal schemes would be mind boggling
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09:30:17 <kimmo> jo-erlend, in Finland our tax authority has a website for small enterprises and households for doign the payrolls, and prints out the accounting memos with the proper splits nicely
09:31:28 <warlord> yeah, you can certainly *enter* a payroll transaction, but it wont auto-compute it for you.
09:32:11 <jo-erlend> is gnucash pluggable so I could write a plugin with payroll management specifically for Norway, for instance?
09:32:53 <kimmo> sure, just submit a patch :D
09:33:22 <jo-erlend> heh.. Then it's not pluggable?
09:35:26 <jo-erlend> as I understand it, gnucash can now use an sql database as backend. Would it be safe to make another application enter data directly to that database?
09:39:24 <jsled> as safe as it is to write your own paragraphs into an openoffice document.
09:39:54 <jsled> jo-erlend: gnucash is, internally, modularized. All the business features, for instance, are dynamically loaded at runtime.
09:40:05 <jsled> There's not a good external "plugin" setup, though.
09:40:32 <jo-erlend> oh, ok. That's good to know.
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10:11:22 <warlord> It would certainly be possible to write a payroll module.. The best way would be to write the core code in C but structure it as a framework where you can provide a scheme or xml locale setting that get executed to compute the various pieces.
10:12:05 <warlord> But as jsled points out, gnucash isn't really distributed in a way that makes it easy to write a third-party standalone plugin.
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10:29:31 <blathijs> warlord: regarding the chargeback, when you said "create a bill", do you mean "create an invoice"? Since you assign bills a chargeback, so you need to create invoices to charge them to customers, right?
10:30:25 <blathijs> warlord: Also, where should this list of items appear? In the normal invoice editing window, or is there some step in between? I think I haven't seen that list when I just tried, but I might need to try again :-)
10:32:06 <warlord> When you create a bill you need to mark the items as billable. Just setting the chargeback customer is not sufficient.
10:32:39 <warlord> Then when you create an invoice for that chargeback customer, the billable items will appear in the invoice window, but not 'marked' as being a part of that invoice.
10:32:58 <blathijs> Ah, I think I forgot that. I'll try it, thanks.
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12:45:47 <blathijs> warlord: That seems to work, cool. One more question though. How to actually include a line in the invoice? It seems I can check the "Invoiced?" column, and the amount gets added to the subtotal of the invoice. However, the line then still shows up in other invoices, with the "Invoiced?" column checked as well
12:46:18 <blathijs> So I'm not sure how I should be able to tell in which invoice it is actually included, apart from looking at subtotals.
12:47:00 <warlord> That's the bug I mentioned earlier.
12:47:03 <warlord> Fixed in 2.3.x
12:47:07 <blathijs> Ah, it from posted invoices. Still a bit confusing with non-posted invoices, though
12:47:14 <blathijs> Ah, right
12:48:14 <blathijs> I didn't understand the bug yet when I first read about it :-)
12:49:51 <warlord> Right
12:52:51 <blathijs> Something entirely different, regarding invoice (etc.) numbering. I was considering making the format string used for each counter (which is currently fixed to %.6something) configurable. Would that make senes?
12:53:26 <blathijs> It would allow a different number of digits and pre- and postfixes to be specified in the file
12:54:13 <warlord> Not really.. Internally it's still a number.
12:55:15 <blathijs> Yeah, so the format string allows for different number formats
12:59:05 <warlord> Why?
13:00:37 <blathijs> Why I want this, you mean?
13:02:11 <blathijs> I'm currently using YYnnn format for invoices, where YY is the current year. For that I need 5 digit precision. In another system I'm using CFnnnnn, so with a prefix
13:03:08 <blathijs> currently, I need to do the numbering manually, but I'd like to configure format strings like %.5d and CF%5d for these cases (where "d" is G_GINT64_FORMAT, not sure what its value is)
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13:04:55 <blathijs> THough I am a bit concerned with the security of making the format string configurable
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13:04:56 <warlord> G_GINT64_FORMAT is variable.
13:05:06 <warlord> Yep.
13:06:08 <warlord> The counter itself is still just a numeric. BUT, I suppose one could change it from %6d to something else. For your YYnnn format you would need to manually adjust it every year.
13:06:36 <blathijs> Yeah, but adjusting once per year beats adjusting on every invoice :-)
13:07:08 <blathijs> I could look into making a proper patch, if the idea seems ok to you :-)
13:07:18 <blathijs> (got to go now, I'll be back in 30 mins or so)
13:07:34 <warlord> ok
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13:42:18 <blathijs> Anyway, making the format string configurable seems like a nice feature
13:43:38 <warlord> Honestly I dont think there's been much call for it, but sure, I can see putting it into the File -> Properties settings, with the current being the default.
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13:44:33 <blathijs> However, if the type and/or number of format specifiers in the format strings are incorrect, random stuff can happen (according to the manpage). It seems that through specially crafted format strings, there is the possibility of out of bounds reading or even writing.
13:46:10 <blathijs> I expect that the current file format is (supposed to be) "safe", in the sense that you can open any file without security implications?
13:46:31 <warlord> Yep.. Which is generally why having variable formats is BAD
13:47:36 <blathijs> So to prevent this, one should either validate the format string (which is yucky) or invent our own template format, which means work :-)
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13:51:33 <warlord> I see you're understanding the scope of your suggestion ;)
13:53:43 <blathijs> :-)
14:05:06 <blathijs> Seems there's nothing useful in glib and libgnome either
14:08:42 <warlord> nope
14:09:17 <warlord> Well, you could just search the string for '%...d'
14:10:19 <warlord> not allow any single % unless it's a valid %...d construct
14:15:15 <blathijs> Something like [^%]*%[#0- +'I-]*[0-9]*(.[0-9]+)?d[^%]*
14:16:15 <blathijs> E.g, very specifically validate to a prefix, a single format specifier and a suffix
14:17:27 <warlord> yeah, something like that would probably work... (without having validated the regex)
14:17:46 <blathijs> I haven't tried it yet either :-)
14:18:20 <blathijs> Let's start with compiling the SVN version cleanly :-)
14:21:23 <warlord> ok
14:28:12 <blathijs> Hmm, 2.3 needs more dependencies than 2.2 it seems (libdbi and texinfo so far)
14:37:46 <blathijs> Hmm, having libgnc installed seems to cause problems
14:37:53 <blathijs> /usr/lib/gnucash/gnucash/libgncmod-report-gnome.so: undefined reference to `gnc_html_copy'
14:39:48 <blathijs> Hmm, it actually seems libgncmod-report-gnome isn't actually on the linker commandline
14:39:52 <warlord> It sounds like you have a previous version already installed? Did you use a --prefix?
14:41:10 <blathijs> Yeah, I have 2.2.9 installed from Debian
14:41:22 <blathijs> And I used ./debian/rules binary, so not sure what options it is using :-)
14:42:15 <blathijs> ./configure --prefix=/usr (and a lot more options)
14:44:21 <warlord> Yeah, that would definitely cause issues...
14:46:20 <blathijs> If the library from /usr/lib would be missing, would that solve things? Or would that just cause the compilation to fail because libgnc-whatever is missing?
14:46:39 <warlord> That's a good question
14:47:16 <blathijs> I guess it should work, since the debian buildd's can compile it as well :-)
14:50:48 <blathijs> Seems to work
14:51:10 <blathijs> Sounds like the linker paths should just be reversed or something then
14:55:50 <blathijs> Yup, now I have a package
14:57:17 <warlord> ok
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15:00:22 <blathijs> Hmm, forgot to bump the debian version. Oh well :-)
15:00:42 <warlord> lol
15:01:45 <blathijs> That's why I didn't understand what aptitude was suggesting :-)
15:12:17 <diakka> wow.. just woke up :D
15:12:39 <diakka> so with stocks, i feel like there should be a better way to handle dividends
15:13:24 <diakka> I've tried doing it as a stock split with 0 shares and the dividend as the cash in lieu which seems kinda logical
15:15:23 <diakka> but the advanced portfolio always seems to show negative income or negative realized gains
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15:27:30 <blathijs> Hmm, while I'm here: What does "Reset the tax tables" mean exactly?
15:28:35 <blathijs> It seems that when I unpost an invoice without resetting the tax tables, the tax transactions are removed from the tax accounts, so resetting probably means something else?
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15:55:08 <warlord> When you post an invoice it makes a silent copy of the tax tables so that you can make changes and it wont affect older invoices.
15:56:33 <warlord> so it's asking: keep the hidden, read-only tax tables or repoint to the read-write tax table
16:03:21 <blathijs> Ah, right. So it actually asks if you want to use the new and updated tax tables. Right :-)
16:05:44 <warlord> :)
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17:26:34 <blathijs> warlord: Any clue if there are backends that define the "coutner" callback? I can't eem to find any
17:26:40 <blathijs> (Apparantly it is a callback that handles getting and incrementing the conter value)
17:27:11 <warlord> I dont know... I would suspect the sql backend would implement it.
17:28:07 <blathijs> The sql backend his funky. The other backends just fill the "be" struct they receeive (setting be->counter = NULL)
17:28:18 <blathijs> but the sql backend ignores the be argument and does register_* calls instead or something
17:28:52 <blathijs> Also, the word "conter" doesn't occur there
17:31:47 <blathijs> (I'm on a mobile connection, sorry for my typo's...)
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17:38:07 <warlord> I've not looked at the sql backend implementation
17:39:55 <blathijs> It's not relevant for the change at hand, but I'm thinking to also add an interface to view/edit the current counter value
17:40:10 <blathijs> but I can just gray out the counters then, I guess
17:42:59 <warlord> We'd probably need a new API to do that.
17:43:07 <warlord> (setcounter)
17:44:39 <warlord> I was actually thinking about setting the counter if the user hand-enters something into the InvoiceID field that's an integer.
17:47:07 <blathijs> You might want to ask whether to do that, thogh
17:48:38 <blathijs> Hmm, I need to remake half of gnucash when I edit qofbook.h :-)
18:06:45 <warlord> Yes, you do. THat's a core header!
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18:37:19 <raleightile> what controls the order of invoice lines? I just added freight to the bottom of an invoice and it went to the top?
18:40:38 <warlord> Date?
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18:48:29 <raleightile> they all show 6/14/2010, is it storing that as some kind of number, does it store second information and just not show?
18:51:36 <warlord> Nope, it shouldn't be storing a timestamp. All dates should be equivalent.
18:51:57 <warlord> Search for gncEntryOrder() to see what it does
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19:18:14 <raleightile> I changed the other lines to 1 day ago for now, does it have a secondary sort?
19:19:10 <raleightile> i did notice the new lines show Tax included? I changed it to off and changed the dates back today, now everything is still in the correct order
19:19:17 <scar> if i want to deposit money into my checking account from an external source that is not tracked by gnucash... how do i enter that transaction?
19:19:33 <jsled> Income:Whatever -> Assets:Checking
19:20:00 <raleightile> I turned it back on, but it didn't change the order any, so that hunch is wrong..
19:21:31 <scar> jsled: ok thx ;)
19:22:10 <warlord> raleightile: The order is: Date, Date_Entered, Desc, Action
19:22:14 <warlord> (then GUID)
19:24:15 <raleightile> it only sorts when you first enter the line, after that the order stays the same?
19:25:04 <raleightile> so when i entered the line it didn't have a date_entered because it wasn't entered yet, all the other lines started with numbers, so "Freight" would sort higher
19:25:26 <raleightile> being part of the desc,
19:28:34 <raleightile> well, that didn't work, so I guess I am unable to recreate the scenario again, but armed with the sort order I'll try and figure out
19:29:34 <raleightile> the only other thing i can think of is when i close the file without posting the invoice, sometimes i loose the last line, and usually when i open back up the "tax included" button gets turned on for all new lines
19:29:53 <raleightile> Thanks
19:30:20 <raleightile> btw fedora is up to 2.3.13
19:30:39 <raleightile> logos back fonts clearer
19:32:42 <raleightile> subtotal/tax/amount due left justified, not sure why..
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