Richard -Gilligan- Uschold <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> We don't need any hidden accounts.
>
> I have been emulating this functionality for the last year or so. I have
> three accounts: the loan principle, mortgage escrow, and interest payments.
> The principle is a liability account, the escrow is a bank account, and the
> interest is an expense account.
The reason I said "hidden" accounts is that these three accounts are,
for all intents and purposes, tied together in a single mortgage. It
really doesn't make sense to be able to separate them, at least in my
mind.
> The recurring payment is simply a split transaction, the total going to each
> of the three accounts, as required. The only difficult part is determining
> the principal and interest amounts. The escrow amount changes periodically,
> also, typically once a year.
Agreed. I'd like to be able to have gnucash determine the principal
and interest amounts for me, so I don't have to. In particular, I
_always_ pay-down my mortgage. I don't want to have to think about
the amount of principal/interest for each payment; that's what
computers are for!
> This could be implemented two ways: as a smart loan account that generates
> the recurring transaction or as a smart recurring transaction that knows how
> to compute loan interest.
Hrm, how about a "smart loan account" that get's tied to the escrow
and interest accounts? In other words, the master loan account, which
would contain the principal computations, has a pointer to an escrow
(bank) account and a pointer to an interest (expense) account (perhaps
as a kvp entry?). It also contains the P/I/T information to
auto-compute the p/i split (also in a kvp entry?). Then a scheduled
transaction to the loan account would automatically force a split into
the interest and/or escrow account.
Actually since the escrow payment is quazi-static (changing once a
year), I think that you could just have that as part of the SX; so the
loan account only needs to deal with the p/i split. In other words, your
mortgage payment SX would be a transaction containing:
Acct Deposit Withdrawal
Checking: $1000.00
Loan: $755.36
Escrow: $244.64
And the "loan" split would automatically "create" a new split, tied to
the transaction:
Loan: $175.27
Interest: $175.27
So, in the end, the actual transaction you'd get in the end would say:
Acct Deposit Withdrawal
Checking: $1000.00
Loan: $580.09
Interest: $175.27
Escrow: $244.64
But I'm not sure how you get one split to automatically create a
second split.
> Of course, the logic should allow for the loan to be an asset, as from the
> banks point of view.
And the interest would be an income... Yea yea yea. The logic is
exactly the same, so let's not worry about that right now.
-derek
--
Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board (SIPB)
URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/ PP-ASEL-IA N1NWH
[EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP key available
_______________________________________________
gnucash-devel mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.gnumatic.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
