[moneydance] More anomolies in the Investment register (MD build 577)

[Gordon Alley]

In preparation for reconciling an investment account, I'm going
through my July statement entering the dividend transactions.

After one particular cash dividend transaction in the statement, there
was a negative dividend transaction canceling it out -- apparently the
first transaction was posted in error.

However, when I tried to enter a negative Div transaction in the MD
register, it appeared to accept the negative value when I typed it in,
but when I clicked RECORD, the resulting entry changed to a positive
value, and the value had been ADDED to the cash balance. There was no
alert or warning.

This appears to be a case where MD is a bit over-engineered. As a
programmer myself, I suspect it took more code to change the negative
to a positive than it would have to have just accepted what I entered.
I can't think of a good reason why MD should ignore the sign of the
number I entered and change it to positive. If the program really
thinks that it is smarter than me, it could put up a small dialog
asking if I REALLY want to enter a negative dividend.

So I went back to the ever-useful Xfr transaction type to enter the
negative dividend and work around the problem. Here I noticed an
oddity. When I started entering the dividend transactions, I had
copied my category name "IRA Income:IRA Dividends" into the clipboard
so I wouldn't have to type it each time. When entering a Div
transaction, MD lets me paste this category into the Category field
with no trouble. But when I tried to paste it into the Transfer field
of the Xfr transaction, the default category there flashed, but did
not change to the pasted name. But it DID allow me to type in ""IRA
Income:IRA Dividends", and accepted it. What's up with that?

Confirmation? Comments?

This is on an iMac G4 800 with OS X 10.4.10.

-- 
Gordon B. Alley
http://www.gordonalley.com