Account Balance graph shows nonsense on Investment accounts
I'm running Mac OSX 10.5.6 with MD 2008r3, build 629. When I run the Account Balance graph on an Investment account, I get the following results:
1) If I run the graph on an individual security within an account, it shows the number of shares held over time. Numerically correct but not very useful. It would be more useful to see the dollar value over time.
2) If I run the graph on the overall account (ex: IRA) withOUT checking the "include subaccounts" box, it shows the uninvested cash balance in the account. The great majority of the time, this is zero in my Investment accounts. Again, numerically correct but useless.
3) If I run the graph on the overall account with "include
subaccounts" checked, it shows amounts that are wildly wrong. The
dollar amounts shown in this case are many times the actual balance
in the account.
FWIW, the Account Balance graph seems to work correctly on Bank and Credit Card accounts. It screws up only on Investment accounts. Unfortunately, it's on Investment accounts where it would be the most useful.
The most troubling thing about this problem is that it's been
known for a long time. I have found tickets about it on the
wiki/bug trac system going back to 2006. None of those tickets have
ever been acknowledged by anyone working on the software or support
staff. I voted +1 on all the related tickets I could find in the
hope of getting some attention to this long-standing
problem.
Any chance of getting this fixed within the lifetime of any current user?
David
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2 Posted by Brian Adler on 02 Jun, 2009 01:17 AM
David, We have looked at this and understand the cause of this issue. I promise we are working on it and will have a fix implemented.
3 Posted by g on 02 Jun, 2009 11:10 AM
Could you post links to the tickets here? Then we can vote on them without having to search through trac to find them.
4 Posted by ds4854 on 02 Jun, 2009 04:57 PM
To g:
Here are the most directly related tickets. The first one is from Feb 2008: http://moneydance.com/trac/ticket/1470
This one is from Oct 2007: http://moneydance.com/trac/ticket/1341
This one is from Jan 2007. I didn't vote on it because it's marked as "closed" for some reason. The bug is still there: http://moneydance.com/trac/ticket/850
This last one is from Feb 2006 (!).
http://moneydance.com/trac/ticket/384
There are other tickets relating to other shortcomings in this graph. This one http://moneydance.com/trac/ticket/1216 is about weird behavior of the "group by" feature. These two are about strange behavior of the "all dates" feature: http://moneydance.com/trac/ticket/1812 and http://moneydance.com/trac/ticket/1744 . This last one is a very reasonable enhancement request about wanting to graph the balances over time of several accounts for comparison: http://moneydance.com/trac/ticket/1813 . I left these out of my initial complaint due to the "one post, one problem" rule. If you would like to see this graph live up to its potential, please vote on them all!
BTW, I found all these just by searching the trac list for "Account Balance graph". My thanks to the MD support staff for providing us with an easily searchable archive of past tickets.
David
5 Posted by ds4854 on 02 Jun, 2009 05:08 PM
To Brian,
Thanks for the acknowledgement. Any idea when we'll see the fix released? I know you guys don't predict dates, but will it be in the next official release? the next preview release? a special build maybe?
We've been waiting 3 years to get this fixed. I'm not bringing this up to be snarky, and I'm sorry if I'm coming across as annoying. To me, and I think to others as well, the biggest shortcoming of MD is that it feels more like unsupported freeware than a commercial product, and unreasonable delays in the repair of obvious bugs are one of the worst symptoms of that feeling. Don't get me wrong: I really like your product. It's easy to use, fast, and generally reliable. However, it's also important to have it be well-maintained.
Thanks for your time.
David
6 Posted by g on 02 Jun, 2009 05:19 PM
Thanks David,
I admit I was being lazy :-). Thanks for the links. I added my votes.
-g
7 Posted by ds4854 on 02 Jun, 2009 06:24 PM
g-
No problem, glad to help.
Thanks for the votes.
David
8 Posted by Brian Adler on 03 Jun, 2009 06:38 PM
David,
I think in an upcoming preview release is a reasonable expectation. I'll get back to you when I can say more conclusively.
Brian
Raimund Buchholz closed this discussion on 17 Dec, 2009 12:58 AM.