Types of reports required

[Robert Graham Merkel]

Jason Rennie writes:
 > 
 > Am Son, 02 Jul 2000 schrieb Robert:
 > > * Tax-related transactions?  Basically
 > > just a transaction report with
 > > 	appropriate accounts selected.  Do we want to do this?  Not
 > > 	straight away, to be honest - too risky! 
 > 
 > Might it be worthwhile to have a property for each account that indicates 
 > whether or not the account is tax-related?  We might even want to make it 
 > specific to the acc. type.  i.e. if "Income" is chosen as the account 
 > type, show a checkbox that says "Taxable Income"?
 > 
Something like this, but even more flexible, is being developed by the
engine guys right now.

 > Am Son, 02 Jul 2000 schrieb Robert:
 > > *Investment Income Report - Dividends
 > > 	                   (taxable/non-taxable)
 > >  			  -Interest (taxable/non-taxable)
 > > 		          - capital gains
 > > 		           redistribution
 > > 			  - expenses.  
 > >                            - realized/unrealized
 > > 			    gain loss.   
 > 
 > poldiwinkler@ngi.de said:
 > > FIFO - first in, first out  - that should be the rule! 
 > 
 > You can't safely make that assumption.  U.S. taxes allow you to match up 
 > buys and sells to reduce gains (compared to what you would be paying with 
 > FIFO or some other simple algorithm).  Maybe we could allow the user to 
 > choose one of three or four cost basis calculation styles?
 > 
Actually, we're going to make it totally user specifiable, if they so
choose.  Some people need this flexibility to minimise tax.

 > Am Son, 02 Jul 2000 schrieb Robert:
 > > Instead, we need to give the ability for our 
 > > users to save report options.  As we already have global options 
 > > saving code, I can't see this being a huge problem.  In that way,  
 > > users can select the categories and dates that should be included in 
 > > the reports to make their own "tax reports" - or anything else.   
 > > To make this easier, we need to be able to specify dates in a relative
 > > manner, such as "this month" or "current accounting period". 
 > 
 > Yup.  We should definitely have something like this.  I'd suggest having
 > "Report Templates" (e.g. investment income, incompe/expense, budget,
 > etc.), "Reports" (report template coupled with user-specified options) and
 > "Statements" (equivalent to the papers the bank sends you every month).  
 > It would be good to make these distinctions and to allow Reports and 
 > Statements to be saved.  Report Templates would be built into GNUCash.
 > 
Agreed.  We already let you export the generated reports (they are
generated as HTML).


 > Am Son, 02 Jul 2000 schrieb Robert:
 > > The final issue I have is how we select which accounts are included in
 > > reports, and which are displayed explicitly and which are subsumed
 > > into the display of a parent account.
 > 
 > poldiwinkler@ngi.de said:
 > > Is it not possible to choose it in each "own report"? 
 > 
 > I agree with Poldi.  Make it specific to each report.
 > 
Yes, but we need a tree widget set up to make this kind of selection
easy.

------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Merkel	                           rgmerk@mira.net

------------------------------------------------------------