On Sat, Mar 31, 2018 at 11:38 AM, Justus Pendleton <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Saturday, March 31, 2018 at 10:07:31 AM UTC+7, Martin Blais wrote: >> >> What about time zone support? This is very useful for frequent >>> international travelers. If I fly eastbound trans-pacific flight, for >>> example, Tokyo to San Francisco, the date will be the same but the local >>> time will backtrack. >>> >> >> That would be a very rare occurrence not worth optimizing for, and >> besides, the date you should record is the date of the place where the >> transaction occurred (for the corresponding institution). It's not designed >> to take into account time, and some small amount of fuzziness is considered >> okay. >> > > First, I agree that it isn't worth optimising for and some small amount of > fuzziness is considered okay. > > That said, I don't think it is quiet as rare as you suggest. Anyone who > has banks in a different timezone (e.g. Europeans who have moved to America > or vice versa, among the many kinds of other expats) will always see issues > around this. As an example from my life: > > I live in GMT+10 but have banking in GMT-8. This means any time I do a > transaction on (what to me) is a Friday, my bank records it on what is (to > them) Thursday. I have hundreds of transactions like that in beancount at > this point. > > In practice, though, this is rarely an issue. As you said, things like > balance statements are one of the few times where it ever comes up. There > are a few times where things happen on a month boundary -- I make a payment > on (to me) April 1 but my bank treats it as March 31 -- and for > budgeting/tracking reasons I would prefer it be part of April. But I'm > pretty sure I don't want the overhead of needing to attach a timezone to > hundreds of entries just to handle those one or two times an edge case > creeps up. > Interesting. When we do have separate transaction and posting/settlement dates, this will become an issue indeed, as we will raise our expectations on what's possible and not accept so easily the need to fuzz. You'd need to do something like have a default timezone per account but > allow overrides and....this is how scope creep happens. > Another possibility is to write a plugin to conditionally shifts the dates of particular accounts. I'm not sure if that would work in all cases, but if you only have a few remote accounts, maybe that's enough. It seems to me the transfer accounts that will be filled in automatically from the settlement proposal will handle your use case nicely. Also, using date/time + tz opens up a rabbit hole of issues... when you sort, what do you display? If you display the local dates, it won't look like a list of sorted dates if you have txns from multple accounts. Do we always convert all the input dates to UTC and then convert back out when rendering the reports? That could get confusing if you compare with your institution's statement (the dates won't match). e.g., when looking at a journal listing, you'd have to make sure to render the dates based on the timezone associated with that particular account. And what happens if you look at a group of accounts? > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Beancount" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/ > msgid/beancount/c6e95a02-44ca-4b3e-9c2d-662f0c8afbf8%40googlegroups.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/c6e95a02-44ca-4b3e-9c2d-662f0c8afbf8%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Beancount" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/CAK21%2BhP9-ro5E9XzAC260ZAW7LogXLrT%2BFCE_eD8-sEN2LH7jQ%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
