[moneydance] Registered Retirement Savings Accounts

[Edward Reid]

At 10:09 11/12/08 +0100, Tjalco P. van der Meij wrote:
>I had not noticed but that I think is correct. You want to be able to
>tag only those transactions related to the specific project and do not
>want to end up with a lot of tags you forgot to remove after auto
>completion.

The same argument applies to the category, amount, and memo. (I often 
forget to remove auto-completed memos, but I can live with that.) If you 
use auto-complete, then you *must* review what auto-complete fills in. That 
only thing that's different about tags is that they are dimmed in the 
display (black on gray in a transaction being entered, gray on white in 
two-line mode otherwise) and are thus harder to see.

In general I consider dropping the tag much worse than having a tag that 
shouldn't be there, because I'm much more likely to notice an incorrect tag 
than a missing tag.

> >  Tags apply only to one
> > side of a transaction, in contrast with everything else in MD.
>Yes it should be like that otherwise you get double amounts in your
>project report. I think tags should only be applied to income and
>expenditure accounts as you want to want to find out the net cost or net
>income of a project, I would think.

Except that I almost always want to report on the OTHER side of the 
transaction. For example, I incur a hotel bill while doing work for Client 
X. I enter it on my Visa account, category Business:Travel:Lodging, tag 
Client X. Later I do a report covering category Business and subcategories, 
and select only transactions tagged Client X (for billing). The tags are 
not present on the category side, so the report is empty.

Same thing for projects. I buy lumber to build shelves at Lowe's and pay 
with a debit card. Account: Personal Checking, Category: Home Improvement, 
Tag: Shelving Project. But then I buy stain and sealer and pay with a 
credit card, and later return a couple of items I didn't need, and give 
away some tools which I then need to debit from the Shelving Project. By 
now, I've forgotten what accounts I used. I also tag some things as 
Shelving Project but use a category of Recreation. Now I want to report on 
just category Home Improvement, tag Shelving Project. Can't do it because 
the tags are on the wrong side.

As for double amounts, this is a problem with quite a few MD reports now. A 
lot of times I try to report something and end up with a total of zero 
because I can't separate the inflow and outflow parts. This is a bigger 
problem which needs a more general solution.

>Personally I feel that too much time is spent on investment reports. For
>that type of thing you can find many good programs outside Moneydance.

My investments are very simple, so I can't comment on that.

>What I like about Moneydance is the ease of use for everyday
>transactions and the flexibility of use. If you know bookkeeping you can
>use Moneydance even for running a small business.

Yes, in fact I do. However, without an invoicing module, it can't go very 
far. I only write two invoices most months, and that's stretching it. (In 
fact I set up each invoice as an account.) Real invoicing would be beyond 
MD's limits. This of course is not a criticism; it's just an explanation of 
the limits within which MD (the current version anyway) is designed.

>I work professionally with major accounting systems like Navision and
>Concord and I am always happy to get back to Moneydance.

I have no doubt ... ;-)

Edward
-- 
Art works by Melynda Reid: http://paleo.org