expense tracking with reports or searches?

[Tom K. Weckstrom]

Hi,

I think I will resort to having a "template" account structure in one file and then
just taking a new structure file into use periodically and keeping the costs in
monthly or yearly files until better reporting comes along. They taught some scheme
in the first programming course at the University, but that was some 6 years ago...
OTOH, I still have the course book... ;-)

My other chance is to wait for a while and hope the future version can separate
costs per month in reports / searches... But what if the feature will not show up
in a while? I'll have a huge file with hundreds of transactions, but not a clue
what the monthly trends for each account have been...

Thanks for enlightening the situation!

    Tom

Robert Graham Merkel wrote:

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

--
Tom Krister Weckström            tel     +358 9 8599 0133
Product Management Engineer      fax     +358 9 8599 0599
                                 mobile  +358 40 564 2709
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