Budget reporting for a time interval

[R. Victor Klassen]

On Jul 2, 2015, at 5:58 PM, Wm <wm+gnc at tarrcity.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> 
> Whoa!  gnc needs a budget before it does any sensible reporting
> 
> Actions / Budget / New budget is your start, not the report

Of course I have a budget, created on a month-by-month basis.   

>> 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.

See above.

> 
> 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.

I don’t need to respond to 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.

At least on the Mac, preferences isn’t under the edit menu.  When I do go to preferences, the only place I find tab position is for editing where the tabs (for selecting among open tabs) appear.  No help whatsoever.

> 
>> What I would like would be something that looks like this:
>> 
>> Account        Actual  Budget  Difference
>> 
>> ….
>> 
> 
> We are always happy to provide a blank screen :)

I think I made myself clear to anyone not known as Wm.

>> 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?

No, but the requirement for the left column to freeze is only required when months are shown in the budget report.

> 
>>  Maybe I have to copy it into a spreadsheet for that.
> 
> I advise doing that anyway.  Budgets are often for presentation.

And they are also often for ordinary people trying to track their finances, to know, on a more than once-a-year basis, how they’re doing.   


> 
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