Skrooge: Order of Operations on same Date

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1

Hi,

I was wondering whether it’s possible to fine-tune the ordering of operations in Skrooge at all.

I import the data for all my accounts into Skrooge - often an arbitrary CSV format specific to that institution is the only lowest common-denominator many banks give me, but sometimes I am lucky enough to get Quicken/Microsoft Money, with more fields, which are maybe not affected in the same way.

I need to report the maximum amount of money I have had in each of my accounts, and this is one reason I use Skrooge. Not uncommonly, I have several operations in one day. My problem is that the ordering that operations come up in Skroooge sometimes does not match what happened in the real world.

As a typical example, let’s say I move a large amount from one savings account to another via my main current account. So this current account has a large deposit and then a large withdrawal on the same day. However, when those are exported from my bank’s online banking, they only mark the day, and not a full timestamp, so Skrooge is perhaps none the wiser.

If the withdrawal comes before the deposit in Skrooge, then it looks like my account has gone overdrawn temporarily on that day. Whereas, if the operations happen in the opposite order, then the balance in my acocunt matches what I get if I check my PDF statement in online banking.

So I was wondering if there is any way to specify the order of operations in a more fine-grained manner in Skrooge at all. I don’t know if there is a real solution to this problem, as it stems from rubbishy access to my data from my banks, or my own imperfections in cleaning the data as part of the import process. If ther’e s a fix for this, then great, would be appreciative of any suggestions. Maybe I can add a synthetic timestamp before I import the data that ensures it goes into Skrooge’s database in the right order, even if this isn’t displayed in the operations window.

However, I am happy to correct it manually for now, but it would be good if I could e.g. drag the operations or add a time field or somehow otherwise mark them manually to occur in the correct order within Skrooge, so that subsequently when I export that account’s data, the balance column is calculated correctly. Otherwise, it’s of limited use to me for this specific exercise, as I’ll always need to go through the PDF copies month by month and verify the amount in the balance column.

I don’t know if Skrooge has this kind of ability - either in the data schema or in the UI. Is there some way to add more refined ordering to items in an account, if they occur on the same calendar day?

Thanks

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2

Hi,
I’m long time user of skrooge and as far as I know order of operations (in one day) isn’t something you can really change (you can somewhat do it by fine tuning the order when inputting data, but thats about it). On the other hand, this wasn really problem, even if in reality you first depostit and then withdraw at the end of the day the amount would be the same in either order of operations. And because the granularity of the time is one day it shoulnd’t be a bother.

3

It is a problem for me however, as I need to track the maximum balance that is in my account over the course of a year. It’s a reporting requirement that I have to meet.

If I have £1000 in my account, and deposit another £10k and then withdraw that later in the day, then if the operations appear in the correct order, the maximum balance that is ever in your account is £11k. If you do it in the reverse order, then the maximum balance is only £1k. This means that my account balance in Skrooge simply doesn’t tie with my statements, and makes it pointless trying to use it for this task.

Is there a reason for having time precision at the level of dates only? I feel that adding precision to whole seconds in accordance with unix timestamps shouldn’t add undue cost in file size, whilst then permitting a fix for this and other situations like it if needed. For a financial tracking program, I feel having an accurate order of operations on record is important. Whilst the fine precision needed for trading stocks and shares may be overkill, for a personal or small business finances application, I feel a granularity of whole days is a bit coarse, and could cause confusion.