2015-09-05 GnuCash IRC logs

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04:10:15 <srbaker> heya folks.
04:10:24 <srbaker> i'm trying to get my personal finances in order, and i have some questions.
04:11:00 <srbaker> first, because of the way visa works, there are two dates: the auth date, and the charge date
04:11:09 <srbaker> my bank orders transactions by the "cleared" date, or charge date
04:11:17 <srbaker> but for me, i care more about the auth date (the date i made the payment)
04:11:45 <srbaker> for instance, if i buy groceries on Saturday, 5 Sep; my bank won't show that as cleared until probably Tuesday the 8th.
04:11:57 <srbaker> (but they provide the auth date in the description, so it's there)
04:12:14 <srbaker> when i enter the transactions in gnucash the way i care about, it makes it harder to reconcile because my balances are out of whack
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04:12:23 <srbaker> is there a Best Practice for thsi?
04:13:00 <srbaker> and next, i would like to be able to tag transactions
04:13:38 <Simon> I don't think there's an easy solution for transactions clearing late
04:13:54 * Simon uses whatever date his credit card provider says is the auth date
04:13:57 <srbaker> what do other people use?
04:14:05 <srbaker> so you use the auth date, not the clearing date?
04:14:32 <Simon> but Amex transactions clear a day or two later from the supermarket I use every day, so that makes reconciliation a bit awkward
04:15:03 <Simon> but you can mark only the transactions that are on your statement as cleared and then reconcile against your current visible balance
04:15:18 <srbaker> oh, interesting
04:15:21 <Simon> the ones that aren't visible yet won't affect it because they're not marked cleared
04:15:33 <srbaker> they are actually visible, in the "pending trnasactions" section
04:15:42 <srbaker> okay, so it sounds like you do what i want to do but felt was a bit forced
04:15:52 <srbaker> my next issue is i want a way to group transactions, but not category
04:15:55 <Simon> you will need to manually input the current balance when doing the reconciliation but that's kind of necessary anyway when they're appearing out of order
04:15:57 <srbaker> basically, i want tags.
04:16:30 <srbaker> when we took my son to Legoland in Billund last weekend, for instance, there were fuel, restaurant, tickets, and toys expenses. all categorized appropriately
04:16:53 <srbaker> but i'd really like to tag those "Legoland Trip" so that next year when we're thinkingof doing it again, i can look up "How much did that trip cost us last year?"
04:17:17 <srbaker> but the reason i dont' want to upset the categories themselves
04:17:40 <srbaker> is that a car rental was included there. and in March of 2016, I want to go through gnucash and ask "How much did I spent on car rentals last year?"
04:17:54 <srbaker> (i'm trying to think about this in terms of the questions i want to ask gnucash in the future)
04:18:30 <srbaker> in HomeBank (the other option i'm evaluating), transactions have a budget category, and tags
04:18:44 <srbaker> (i don't mind writing code to solve this problem; i jus tdon't know where to start)
04:19:23 <Simon> I don't have any easy solution for that, but watch out for single transactions with multiple things when you're looking for a tagging solution
04:19:58 <srbaker> how do you mean?
04:20:34 <Simon> you might buy other things at the same time as fuel and pay for it at the same time
04:20:41 <srbaker> right, i split those.
04:21:02 <Simon> into two transactions? (you can split a transaction)
04:21:03 <srbaker> since moving to Sweden, that rarely happens, because i pay at the pump, and it's always a separate transaction.
04:21:21 <srbaker> but in canada, i often had fuel + snacks on the same amount. so i split the transaction
04:21:26 <srbaker> no, a split transaction
04:21:43 <Simon> right - so watch out for something that doesn't let you tag those individually if you want to tag them
04:22:18 <srbaker> right
04:22:29 <Simon> you could just give the legoland trip its own account(s0
04:22:30 <srbaker> does the gnucash plugin architecture allow fields to be added to transactions easily?
04:22:38 <Simon> I don't know
04:22:56 <srbaker> so that's another thing. i could have an account per trip. but then it's hard to say "give me a report for all of the fuel expenses last year"
04:23:06 <srbaker> because i have to remember to include every sub-account of every trip
04:23:40 <Simon> well if they're named the same then you could find all the Fuel accounts
04:23:46 <srbaker> oh?
04:24:10 <Simon> (this doesn't scale very well though, if you went on a trip every week, so yes tags would be useful)
04:24:11 <srbaker> how do i do that?
04:24:33 <srbaker> well, that's my concern. there will be 6-10 trips per year
04:25:05 <Simon> you can adjust the accounts used in a report (although there's no "select all 'Fuel' accounts" option)
04:25:22 <srbaker> ah, okay
04:26:28 <Simon> I suspect the "Find" result could be improved to show a balance
04:26:47 <Simon> the balance would need to be relative to some top level account in order to give it a meaning
04:26:53 <srbaker> right
04:27:00 <Simon> e.g. "balance = total value going to Expenses:*"
04:27:43 <Simon> it would then be practical to use tags
04:28:11 <Simon> of course, you then have no way to properly handle a split that includes tags you didn't search for :)
04:31:42 <srbaker> is there a way to put "notes" on a transactoin? i can't find that
04:31:56 <srbaker> but if i can do that, i can easily write a python program to look for tags in notes
04:33:23 <srbaker> i see i can associate a file or url with a transaction... i might be able to work from there
04:37:25 <srbaker> aha, i think i found it
04:37:33 <srbaker> alright, time to go for a walk. thanks for your help!
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08:03:07 <Jazoray> oh hi there. when beginning completely from scratch, is there a way to say "these are my assets at begin" without counting them as profit?
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08:48:47 <Jazoray> oh well, i can just use the opening balance account. another question: should i make a transfer from checking account to liability count as expense? and if so, how do i do that?
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09:11:21 <Jazoray> why the fuck does this shit program force me to use imbalance in USD despite i set eur as currency everywhere.
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13:32:29 <tanderson> Hello. I am using gnucash 2.6.7 and I am curious what could cause the gnucash binary to not correctly work with Finance::Quote when gnc-fq-update works well and returns valid info
13:32:57 <tanderson> The only error message I get is "There was an unknown error while retrieving the price quotes."
13:34:08 <tanderson> I have the required perl modules installed in my $HOME since my distro does not provide them, but gnc-fq-update works so I do not know why that would be a problem
13:35:10 <tanderson> That is, to run gnc-fq-update I use the following env variables(also present in the ENV that gnucash is run in): >PERL_MM_OPT=INSTALL_BASE="${HOME}/.local" PERL_MB_OPT="--install-base=${HOME}/.local" PERL5LIB="${HOME}/.local/lib/perl5/x86_64-linux:${HOME}/.local/lib/perl5"
13:35:43 <tanderson> Any thoughts?
13:59:02 <Simon> you can use strace to find out what it's really doing
14:08:37 <tanderson> That doesn't really help. the most info I can get is that it is opening /usr/share/gnucash/scm/gnucash/price-quotes.scm
14:08:52 <tanderson> --debug and --extra result in no additional output
14:13:46 <tanderson> oh, found it.
14:13:53 <tanderson> From gnc-fq-helper: Can't locate Date/Manip.pm in @INC
14:14:10 <tanderson> Apparently the gnc-fq-update script doesn't install Date::Manip even though it is needed
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