swap accountFrom and accountTo, allow for negative amounts

[palmista]

First of all thank you for developing this useful app!

Problem: The accountFrom part of the transaction is written above the accountTo part. This contradicts standard accounting conventions from my area where the receiving account is always stated before the diminished account.

I know in English speaking areas the conventions are slightly different, stating the debit account before the credit account. But again, that contradicts the order you chose because at least for basic transactions, the debit account is the one with the positive entry and the credit account the one with the negative one.

Possible solution(s):

1. Swap the accountFrom and accountTo elements both in the "new transaction" form and in the actual transaction in the beancount file.
2. More importantly: Allow for negative amounts in the "new transaction" form. This will give more flexibility and also for a workaround if or as long as point 1. isn't implemented.

Thanks for your consideration!

[xuhcc]

Hello @palmista !

Swap the accountFrom and accountTo elements both in the "new transaction" form and in the actual transaction in the beancount file.

I can add a setting that would allow to change the order of these fields. It shouldn't be very difficult.

[xuhcc]

New version of Beancount Mobile app (v1.5.0) has been released.

Now you can add this custom directive to your beancount file:

1970-01-01 custom "bcm_option" "account_order" "to_from"

[palmista]

Somehow, that isn't working for me. Setting an operating currency in the file is, the custom options (transaction_flags, account_order) isn't.

This is the content of my test file:

* Options
option "operating_currency" "CHF"

1970-01-01 custom "bcm_option" "transaction_flags" "['!']"

1970-01-01 custom "bcm_option" "account_order" "to_from"

* Accounts
2020-04-01 open Assets:Bank
2020-04-01 open Expenses:Food

* Transactions

2020-06-05 * "Test"
    Assets:Bank  -5 CHF
    Expenses:Food  5 CHF

Did I do anything wrong?

[xuhcc]

Make sure you have the latest version (1.5.0). I just tried to add transaction to your file and it works as expected:

[palmista]

That's weird!

I do have 1.5.0, and reinstalling the app from aurora store or directly from your repository didn't help.

Edit: I tried it without success on two different phones, one with Android 7.1.2 (Samsung Galaxy S7 with /e/), the other with Android 4.4.4 (Samsung J-100 with stock ROM).

[xuhcc]

Maybe your beancount file is different from what you posted above?

[palmista]

No, it's not. I even copy-pasted the whole text back into a file to make sure. Whatever I try, I can't make it work. What environment have you tested it in?

[xuhcc]

Android 6, 9.

[palmista]

Tried on a third phone with android 8.0.0 - not working. Just to be sure: Here is one of the files I was testing with:

test(3) (2).txt

[xuhcc]

In the lines where custom options are defined you are using non-breakable spaces (https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+00A0) instead of regular spaces (https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+0020), so the parser can't read these lines.

[palmista]

Thanks, that solved the issue. I ended up with them because I had copied the code lines from the GitHub Android app. Will certainly avoid doing that in the future. Thanks for your patience, and thanks for implementing this feature!