Rolling Dates for Reports and Budgets

[Phil Longstaff]

On Fri, 2010-09-03 at 14:43 -0700, David T. wrote:
> As I continue my journey as a loyal but essentially clueless user of Gnucash for my personal accounts, I am continually bumping my head against the reports subsystem (and I eagerly await 2.4 where many fixes will greet me).
> 
> It occurs to me that many of my own gripes, as well as those I see in the lists from other users, might be ameliorated if Gnucash's reports had the ability to use rolling and relative time frames. For example, I would love to be able to have a report of monthly expenses over the last year that I could run at any point and see the last 12 months' data. Similarly, some way of defining quarters would be useful. I see that there commonly are date definitions for Current and Previous Year; I am wondering whether other such abstract date ranges could be implemented.

I agree.  2.4 will have some new capabilities but will not yet have a
new report generation infrastructure.  My complaint with the current
budget report is that it is much too wide.  In response, I modified it
so that I can specify how periods are to be displayed/combined.  For
example, passing in the scheme list:

  (8 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8) (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12))

will generate a budget report with 3 columns (actually, 9, with budget,
actual and diff for each of 3 period combinations).  1st: period 8
(August), 2nd: sum of period 1-8 (year-to-date), 3rd: sum of all columns
(full year).  This allows me to see how I'm doing vs budget for 1) this
month, 2) year-to-date, 3) vs full-year budget.

Since webkit supports javascript and css, it is possible to create:
1) scrolling tables with headings that don't move
2) collapsible parents so that you can individually expand/contract
levels of account hierarchy
3) lots of other stuff

Phil