Budget report improvements

[Steven Wilton]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Shoemaker [mailto:c.shoemaker at cox.net] 
> Sent: Thursday, 12 October 2006 10:42 AM
> To: Steven Wilton
> Cc: gnucash-devel at gnucash.org
> Subject: Re: Budget report improvements
> 
> Hi Steven,
>         Sorry for the late reply, I'm just getting back to stuff like
> this now.  Thanks for the patch.

No worries.

> On Sat, Sep 09, 2006 at 11:51:58AM +0800, Steven Wilton wrote:
> > I like the budget feature in gnucash 2.0, but there were a 
> few features 
> > that I felt were missing in the report.  Unfortunately I've 
> not programmed 
> > in guile or lisp before, but I gave it a shot, and thought 
> I'd send the 
> > work I'd done to this list in case anyone else thinks the 
> features are 
> > useful.
> > 
> > The patch does 3 things:
> > 1 - It adds the sub-accounts in the budget columns to give 
> a total.  I did 
> > this because the actual columns already contained the total of all 
> > sub-accounts.
> 
> I don't think that's generally correct behavior.  What if not all
> sub-accounts are budgeted for?  If a user wants to budget at the level
> of the parent account, they can enter a budget value for the parent
> account.  This may or may not be the sum of budgeted children (if
> there even are any).

I'm not actually concerned about the budget account adding the totals, but
the problem here is that the "actual" column behaves differently from the
"budget" column.  Given the fact that the "actual" column is filled in by a
piece if c code, I fixed the "budget" column the match the "actual" (except
the "budget" column sometimes comes up blank, which I can't figure out).

> > 2 - It adds an option to make the budget and actual amounts 
> cumulative.
> 
> Interesting.  I'm ambivalent about this behavior.  On the one hand, I
> understand why it is useful to see this information.  You're basically
> viewing actual and budgeted account _balances_.  I'd like to see this
> information be easily available.  
> 
> On the other hand, this means reporting budget values that are
> _accumulation_ of the specified values, instead of identical to the
> specified values.  Also, there are clearly uses when seeing the
> accumulated values is definitely not what you want.  (But, yes, it's
> optional.)  
> 
> I'm going to think about this some more, but in any case, if we want
> this optional behavior, there are easier ways to get account balances
> - and it could probably use some assistance from the C-side of
> budgets.

I'm using gnucash for my personal budgeting, and the running totals for the
year is useful for some expense accounts.  I can see how it would not make
much sense for asset and liability accounts.

> > 3 - It allows the user to select a single budget period to 
> show data for.
> 
> That's clearly useful.  Maybe a range of periods?

Having a range of periods would be good too.  The option would need to be
modified use the actual number of budget periods rather than a hard coded
number :)

> > 4 - It reduces the displayed accounts to income and expense 
> only (not a 
> > core feature, but it was the only way I could see to easily 
> remove all the 
> > asset and liability accounts from the report)
> 
> You just changed the default.  There's a full account selector in the
> options.  But, I like that as default setting.

This was included more to acknowledge the fact that the patch modified this
behaviour.  I personally found the full account selector was clumsy to use
to just select the income and expense accounts (which is why I modified the
report source to make this the default).  I'm not sure of a way to suggest
to improve this, but it may be worth some thought.


Steven

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