Account History Fix

Ok, so I realize that this thing is terribly broken in terms of how it does it's accounting. No accountant would EVER track the way this thing is doing! I'll forego that rant to request something I am reasonably sure is simple.

Could LL please reverse the order of the taxes and the stipend/bonus entries? Right now, most users are going to read this top to bottom and wonder why their bonus + stipend = x, but current $ = y. If they take the time, they would figure out that x - total taxes = y, but it would be much easier to just have all the entries in a mathematical progression that flows with the actual math.

So what I would like to see on the account history summary page is as follows:

last week's balance: Z (which I know doesn't really work properly, which is probably why you guys have not bothered with this yet as you have bigger fish to fry)

Stipend: a
Bonus: b
Total Paycheck: c (= a + b)

Tax a: d
tax b: e
Tax n: n
Total Taxes: q (= d + e + ... + n)

Current Account balance: r (= z + c - q)

You don't actually have to show the formulas in the parents, I am just putting them there to reflect how I envision the math would work.

I feel this would make WAY more sense to a lot of people and would be a lot less confusing.

Any votes on this one, or am I the only accountant in the group?

All I know is it doesnt make a whole lot of sense the way it is now. Also, why is it when I look at summary & details my stipend+bonus are never the same on the two?

Ok LL, it's all Misnomers fault. She got me with her commend, and now I am going into the aforementioned rant.

The reason for that is that they are using some form of sliding accounting window/schedule that makes them add and use different numbers. It is completely goofy. On any given day (let's pick today) I can go in and look at the history and go back week by week and they all reflect Sunday start days. If I do the same thing tomorrow, they will all reflect Monday start days. I want to know what happened last week, not over the last 7 days, since that number is always changing, which also means that the numbers represented by the "last 7 days" and the "last 7 days before them" are also always changing.

No accounting system in the RealWorld(TM) would do this. It is entirely bozo mode goofy. And very frustrating for someone who is trying to make sense of what it costs him to live and support his "objects" so he can budget for creation of new objects and acquire new land and not go negative.

For example, my object deletion/recovery amount reflects EVERY OBJECT I EVER DELETED FROM DAY 1! If I sit down and think about it based on what I am seeing, I would have to guess that what they are probably trying to do is not grow an accounting database so they keep ALL the numbers as cumulative...therefore you don't have a "history" per se, but instead a "YTD" (year-to-date) or "BTD" (birth-to-date "value". This way, they just use one set of records for each person and keep growing that person's record instead of additional records to track past history.

If that is indeed what they are doing, they need to stop calling it history and call it transactions to date or something. If they do indeed believe they are doing a "history", then either they are kidding themselves, or the "accounting system" is playing a really good, long, April Fool's joke on them.

=)

Hey, LL. If you want a users opinion on sorting out what it should be doing versus what it is doing, I am happy to work with you guys to help clean this up. I think this is a very important tool for those of us who want to budget and save and plan for their larger projects and ongoing longevity and financial stability.

I am kind of curious how my bonus can go down almost $4000 in two weeks. Did I get THAT many negative ratings ?? I'm glad to see I'm not the only one that doesn't understand the "Account History".


-TK

Zanlew, I'm all for accountable accounting in SL. <AOL>Me too!</AOL>

from what i understand, if your cash on hand is > $3500 (or something like that), the bonus is modified to be <= taxes. i.e. if you would normally receive a $6000 bonus, but have $4500 on hand, and only $1500 in taxes, your bonus would be chopped to $1500, just to pay for the taxes. if your bonus were only $1000 though, you would just get the full $1000.

i THINK that's how it works. if this is the case though, i think the base amount ($3500) should be increased. i can easily spend $5000+ in a day or two in land purchases and object creation, and in the past two or three days, have gone from >$8k cash on hand to less than $3k.

And the gifts / sales can we get it to include (with a negative sign) ammounts we give out? Or on their own page? Their own page makes sense for me (because of my arcade ) but I don't need em and it may not make sense to most people for whom both pages would be blank or nearly blank most of the time.