doc: transactions for getting back "lend"/refund money

[rugk]

Follow-up of https://bugs.launchpad.net/homebank/+bug/1766279

The use case:
> Basically I have entries in my transaction list, where I spend money. Now some days later I may get (a part of that) money back from someone else. This happens, e.g. when someone "lends" money when they have nothing to pay with and I just pay it for them and get it back afterwards.
So I add the first spending with a negative amount and the second with a positive one.
Basically what I want to do is sort the "spendings" by "account balance" value, so that these things are also included in the calculation and no "wrong" spendings are showed there.
So maybe this needs another issue. Let me know what you think.

So maybe this needs some changes in the software? A special way of choosing "lend"/fee/refund money? (Maybe a special type, such as the "credit transfer" ones?)

BTW, because you said professional fees… well… yeah. Personally I rather thought about the day-to-day "loans", but the procedure should be more or less the same.

[Maxime DOYEN (mdoyen)]

this is why I have made the remind status
if not sufficient I would suggest 1600356

[rugk (48509946-3)]

Actually seeing/noticing the spend values is not the issue I am facing.

As described in https://bugs.launchpad.net/homebank/+bug/1766279 it is more or less only the evaluations/summaries that will display "incorrect" results when you enter sending and getting money back in two transactions.

Maybe you lost the context here, so here is your reply from the other issue:
> for your usage, which is typically what occurs for professional fees, I don't see how to get a representative graph for that. Maybe requires more though, but in another ticket then.

So this is just what this ticket is about.

E.g. when you "lend" 500€ in some category to someone, your spendings in that category will increase by 500€ – even though you may get the same amount of money back from the same person, where you've lent it, it will destroy your "spending" statistic for that category.

[Maxime DOYEN (mdoyen)]

from 1772141:

My friend Mike gave me 10 € that I have to give him back.
I lent 50 € to my sister, I have to remember that.

How are we supposed to do such kind of transactions in HB?

Is it a payee? I don't think that's the purpose of that feature
Is it a category? But then I'd consider that a expense/income, which isn't true (unless me or them are not going to return that money).
Is it an account? It seems most sensible, but it's definitely not a bank, cash or credit card, and not exactly an active or passive (since I can lend money to them, or them to me in the future).

I think this use case should be documented, and possibly a new account category (Debts) should be added.

[Maxime DOYEN (mdoyen)]

the correct usage is:

A) when someone must pay you back something:
you enter a txn with +50$ he need to pay you back (with a payee = him/her)
set the status to remind, so that the txn is ignored everywhere, just displayed

B) when you must someone back
you do the same, enter a txn with -10$ with mike as payee, and set to remind

when you get/send back the money, you unset the remind status

this is the way I designed this.
maybe I should add this to the documentation, let me know.

[rugk (48509946-3)]

Okay, so you need two transactions? One for actual getting/lending money and one for getting it back via remind? (Otherwise you would have a wrong balance afterwards.)

E.g. A case:
* balance = 20€
* you lend Mike 10€ and enter that as transaction
* balance = 10€
* you also enter +10€ from Mike with remind status
* 3 days later…
* you get money from Mike back and unset remind status
* balance = 20€

The only problem I now have is that the previously set remind transaction still has the old date set, when you lend the money. However, as you only get the money back 3 days later, the transaction should have the date after 3 days, not the old date, where you lend money. (because well… you did not get it back 3 days ago,m but now. Everything else is incorrect.)
So you'd also manually need to adjust the date…

And yes, this should certainly be somewhat documented.

[Yajo (yajo)]

I'd love to see docs too on the matter.

[Maxime DOYEN (mdoyen)]

@rugk: date can (and must to me) be different, as the register book is to write txn the date their occurs, so yes if a friend pay back 3 days after you lent him, you will have -50 bucks for 3 days, but that's how the finance book work and that's the same system bank use for us to pay some fees when your salary arrives after a txn that put your account into overdraft even for 1 day :/

I used to lend lot of money when I was younger and I built the remind status/process for that reason, and it worked pretty well to follow all my paybacks, last for month, and sometimes years after the lent. I was using category and payee as well to track this.

I will add a chapter into the documentation for this.

[Maxime DOYEN (mdoyen)]

done:

http://homebank.free.fr/help/

Usage
> Lend/Refund money

[rugk (48509946-3)]

Yes nice. The only thing what I would propose is to actually _automatically_ change then date to the current date, when you switch from "remind" to something else like "cleared". This likely saves most clicks in the common use case you've documented. :)

Or should I open a new issue/bug for that?