expense tracking with reports or searches?

[Robert Graham Merkel]

Tom K. Weckstrom writes:
 > 
 >        Hello!
 > 
 > I started using GnuCash 1.4.4 last week.
 > I use it for personal purposes - mainly to track my financial expenses, but
 > also income.
 > I have quite a long account structure for expenses (three levels in
 > hierarchy, about 30 expense accounts).
 > 
 > So, a couple of questions:
 > 
 > 1) I can see the sum of the lower level expense accounts in the balance of a
 > higher level expense account. I want to track expenses by month, week,
 > quarter, and year, at least.
 > For example, I have a hierarchy of expense accounts:
 > - Transportation
 > ---- Car
 > -------- Gasoline
 > -------- Repairments
 > -------- ...
 > ---- Bus tickets
 > ---- ...
 > 
 > Now, how to get a report on Transportation expenses from August
2000?
 > What about Car expenses only from June to September 2000?

Right now, you could probably use the transaction report to get this
kind of information, if you want.

The current expense report is fairly primitive.  We're working on new
reporting infrastructure for the next release.  One thing I've been
kicking round in my head for the past few days is designing a widget
for you to specify groups of accounts in a very flexible
manner... which I'm post an outline on to the -devel list soon.

If you know a little Scheme, you can hack together your own custom
report as well.

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Robert Merkel	                           rgmerk@mira.net

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