On Saturday, March 31, 2018 at 10:07:31 AM UTC+7, Martin Blais wrote: > > What about time zone support? This is very useful for frequent >> international travelers. If I fly eastbound trans-pacific flight, for >> example, Tokyo to San Francisco, the date will be the same but the local >> time will backtrack. >> > > That would be a very rare occurrence not worth optimizing for, and > besides, the date you should record is the date of the place where the > transaction occurred (for the corresponding institution). It's not designed > to take into account time, and some small amount of fuzziness is considered > okay. >
First, I agree that it isn't worth optimising for and some small amount of fuzziness is considered okay. That said, I don't think it is quiet as rare as you suggest. Anyone who has banks in a different timezone (e.g. Europeans who have moved to America or vice versa, among the many kinds of other expats) will always see issues around this. As an example from my life: I live in GMT+10 but have banking in GMT-8. This means any time I do a transaction on (what to me) is a Friday, my bank records it on what is (to them) Thursday. I have hundreds of transactions like that in beancount at this point. In practice, though, this is rarely an issue. As you said, things like balance statements are one of the few times where it ever comes up. There are a few times where things happen on a month boundary -- I make a payment on (to me) April 1 but my bank treats it as March 31 -- and for budgeting/tracking reasons I would prefer it be part of April. But I'm pretty sure I don't want the overhead of needing to attach a timezone to hundreds of entries just to handle those one or two times an edge case creeps up. You'd need to do something like have a default timezone per account but allow overrides and....this is how scope creep happens. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Beancount" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to beancount+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to beancount@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/c6e95a02-44ca-4b3e-9c2d-662f0c8afbf8%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
