acq: debit attribution feature used?

[Galen Charlton]

Back in 2010 infrastructure was added to try to attribute fund debits in acquisitions to funding source credits, e.g., to track expenditures of grant funds.

This feature barely has a user interface: the only way to calculate debit attributions is torun the stored procedure acq.attribute_debits(), which in turn truncates the table acq.debit_attribution and repopulates it with its best guess based on the effective and deadline dates set for the funding source credits.

I suspect this may be a necro-feature, so I would like to find out if anybody is using it? Since it's making an educated guess about which funding source credit applies to a given fund debit, I would also be curious to know if that's sufficient for tracking (say) grant expenditures.

I think one of the following should be done:

- If the feature is being used (or is judged potentially useful in its current state), it should be documented and a staff UI provided to activate it.
- If the feature is not being used, it should be considered for deprecation and removal (and/or relegation to an optional add-on component).
- Development should be considered to allow acquisitions users to precise state that a particular funding source credit applies to a debit.

[Galen Charlton (gmc)]

For reference, here's the comment describing acq.attribute_debits() calculation:

"Function to attribute expenditures and encumbrances to funding source credits,
and thereby to funding sources.

Read the debits in chonological order, attributing each one to one or
more funding source credits. Constraints:

1. Don't attribute more to a credit than the amount of the credit.

2. For a given fund, don't attribute more to a funding source than the
source has allocated to that fund.

3. Attribute debits to credits with deadlines before attributing them to
credits without deadlines. Otherwise attribute to the earliest credits
first, based on the deadline date when present, or on the effective date
when there is no deadline. Use funding_source_credit.id as a tie-breaker.
This ordering is defined by an ORDER BY clause on the view
acq.ordered_funding_source_credit.

Start by truncating the table acq.debit_attribution. Then insert a row
into that table for each attribution. If a debit cannot be fully
attributed, insert a row for the unattributable balance, with the
funding_source_credit and credit_amount columns NULL."