[Kde-finance-apps] Re: payment detection

[Thomas Baumgart]

Hi,

on Wednesday 08 June 2011 02:11:15 Alvaro Soliverez wrote:

> You have to consider the case when an invoice is paid with multiple
> payments. That means there should be an intermediate entity, because
> you can have an n:n relationship.

The way to handle this - AFAICS right now - is using lots (check this page 
over at our friends from GnuCash: 
http://wiki.gnucash.org/docs/HEAD/lotsoverview.html).  It will serve us well 
with investments (being able to do LIFO and FIFO stuff) as well as keeping 
track of invoice payments, both A/P and A/R.

A few simple things about a lot:

* A lot has a balance and two states.
* The states are open and closed.
* A closed lot has a balance of 0.
* The first transaction opens the lot.
* A lot usually (and I was about to leave the work usually out, but I don't 
know for sure) has a single opening transaction either being positive or 
negative. All other transactions must have the opposite sign.
* While assigning transactions to lots the lot balance cannot cross the zero 
balance in either direction.
* Each split of a transaction can be assigned to exactly one lot
* The balance of a lot is the sum of all splits referencing it

> Also, the invoice seems to lack data. The payer (including name and
> perhaps other data like id or company tax id, as issued in some
> countries), expected payment date, expected number of payments
> 
> Also, should there be some logic within Alkimia to suggest the
> invoice-payment matching, or would that be within each client? I think
> this should be common logic and it should be in Alkimia.

There could be an Alkimia function to suggest the payment/lot assignment but 
the user should be able to overrule the suggestion. There must be a feature to 
be able to split a transaction to assign parts of it to different lots.

While thinking about all this I somehow come to the conclusion that this is 
all logic pretty close to the financial application and kind of hard to be 
generalized.  

Nevertheless, there could be an Alkimia interface/service that is used to 
signal the opening of a lot (eg. Kraft signals KMyMoney to open a lot for a 
newly issued invoice) and the closing of a lot (eg. KMyMoney signals to Kraft 
that a lot has been closed = reached a balance of zero). All those details 
about the invoice (eg. invoice number, tax, what-do-I-know) can be attributes 
to the lot.


> You could start setting up your development environment, which it will
> take you some time, given this is your first in Qt. What distro are
> you running?
> 
> Regards,
> Alvaro
> 
> PS. Please always write to the mailing list, as Klaas is also helping
> on this, and others have more knowledge in most areas than me.

+1

-- 

Regards

Thomas Baumgart

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