Budget reporting for a time interval

[Wm]

Wed, 1 Jul 2015 17:33:07 
<01E3FFCA-D79C-4112-ADE1-B0D1ECBACC7B at gmail.com>  R. Victor Klassen 
<rvklassen at gmail.com>

>When I run a budget report, at least the one I’ve found, I get the 
>option of showing actuals, budget and differences, and the total for 
>the year.

Whoa!  gnc needs a budget before it does any sensible reporting

Actions / Budget / New budget is your start, not the report

>But there doesn’t appear to be a way of asking for how I’m doing on 
>(say), the first quarter, or the first five months of the year against 
>projections.

You may think it old fashioned but gn still thinks you must set up the 
budget before you compare it to actual figures.

I know it sounds weird but that is the way it is, any reasonable person 
would have expected gnc to guess, right?  Well, it can do that too, if 
you set up a budget based on previous periods.  But you have to tell it 
to do that.

>When I do get, if I want to see actuals, budget and differences, is so 
>wide I can’t see it without scrolling, and then the accounts scroll 
>off to the left, so I can’t see the totals for the year and the 
>account names at the same time.

Personally I blame the small god of screen sizes, he is an inconsistent 
imp.

Sightly more realistically, I find that using Edit / Preferences / Tab 
position fixes that.  I've no idea why it works but it does for me, I 
found it out by chance.

>What I would like would be something that looks like this:
>
>Account        Actual  Budget  Difference
>
>….
>

We are always happy to provide a blank screen :)

>where I get to select the date range, the accounts, and which year’s 
>budget it’s based on.  All of these I have, except the date range.
>
>Am I missing something?  This seems like a very basic form of budget reporting.

Yes, it is.  Given its scope it works fine.

>Optionally I’d like to have the specific months in the date range, 
>but then I’d really want the left column to freeze when I scroll.

Are those mutually exclusive things?

>   Maybe I have to copy it into a spreadsheet for that.

I advise doing that anyway.  Budgets are often for presentation.

-- 
Wm...