[GNC] Compare two sets of accounts?

[Kalpesh Patel]

Unix diff utility would be very handy to compare csv files...

Make use of  -i -E -Z -b -w -B  and -c options.

-----Original Message-----
From: Adrien Monteleone <adrien.monteleone at lusfiber.net> 
Sent: Friday, January 19, 2024 8:00 PM
To: gnucash-user at lists.gnucash.org
Subject: Re: [GNC] Compare two sets of accounts?

Along with the idea of exporting your present book via CSV, when you get back the file from the accountant, export that book as CSV too. Then do a diff on the CSV files.

Those should be less messy to read than the XML.

You could then take the diff results as a CSV and import them.

Regards,
Adrien

On 1/19/24 7:50 AM, Simon Roberts wrote:
> Does GNC provide any mechanism for comparing two versions of the same 
> set of accounts?
> 
> I'll be sending my books to my accountant soon, and I imagine they 
> will have some corrections/adjustments. I'll be giving them a laptop 
> with GNC installed, so they can most easily browse, and it occurs to 
> me that they could also make their changes in place. But, unless they 
> write down separately every entry they create or change, I would need 
> to somehow re-integrate their work with my "master" file. Either that, 
> or I'd have to freeze my bookkeeping while they're working on things, 
> and that's likely to take too long to be acceptable.
> 
> With the hostage-taker's rent-ware that I used to use, there was a 
> specific mechanism for an "accountant's copy" and a means to merge the 
> changes back automatically. But I've failed to find this in the docs 
> for GNC (quite possibly as a result of poor / uninspired searching!)
> 
> Is this supported directly? Is this something folks have found an 
> approach for? I suppose, as a not quite worst case, I could simply 
> diff the XML file itself, but that's going to produce results that 
> will be somewhat messy, at best. But at least I'd know something about what changed.
> 
> What ideas can you offer (or manual pages, if I've failed that
> embarrassingly!)