New Budget Report

[Phil Longstaff]

What does EOY give you?

It sounds as though if you specify:
   1) Start Date = start of year
   2) # months = 12
   3) YTD off and EOY off
then you get the current basic budget report.  If you specify:
   1) Start Date = current month
   2) #months = 1
   3) YTD on and EOY on
then you get my report.

One thing I tried to do is build a "budget report engine" which would allow you 
to specify the accounts (rows) and columns you want and out would come the 
report.  The columns are specified as a scheme list where each entry is a) a 
number representing a month (0=Jan, 11=Dec), or b) a list of month numbers in 
which case that column is the sum of those months.  So, for June (month=5), the 
column control list is:
    (5 (0 1 2 3 4 5) (0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12))

This would be easily expandible.  (4 5 6 (0 1 2 3 4 5) (0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 
11 12)) would have columns for May, June, July, YTD(June) and full year.

The current budget report would be (0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12).

Maybe I'll work on formalizing and releasing the engine and then rewriting the 
current budget report in terms of it.  It would make your report easier too.  
I'd to move to this kind of report engine so that, for example, we could pass a 
list of dates to the Balance Sheet report and get a multi-column report showing 
account balances on a series of dates, or list of date ranges for an Income 
Statement.  Would allow period comparisons.  I'll look at how your report is 
generated to see if there are ideas I can adopt.

 Phil
---------
I used to be a hypochondriac AND a kleptomaniac. So I took something for it.




________________________________
From: Benjamin Johnsen <ben.johnsen at gmail.com>
To: Phil Longstaff <plongstaff at rogers.com>
Cc: Christian Stimming <stimming at tuhh.de>; gnucash-devel at gnucash.org
Sent: Wed, January 12, 2011 3:31:53 PM
Subject: Re: New Budget Report

Phil,

I was not aware of the report you sent out.  I agree things could get confusing.

I was sending out an update to the report that I sent back in 2008 because I had 
been getting a number of questions about.

The way my report works is it looks for accounts that have a budget value 
defined and will display those accounts.
The number of columns is user defined.  In the options they can specify the 
Start Date and then the number of months to show.  There are also a "Year to 
Date" and "End of Year" column that can be turn on and off through options. 
 Each column (Month, YTD or EOY) have a budget, actual and difference 
sub-columns.  Also for each column there are rows that are defined at Income, 
Expense and Total.

It sounds like our reports are very similar.  I will let the team decide how 
they want to handle it.  If they only want to include one that is fine with me. 
 If they want to include both and want to dictated a naming convention that is 
also fine with me.

Thanks,
Ben

On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 3:07 PM, Phil Longstaff <plongstaff at rogers.com> wrote:
Ben,
>
>what is in your advanced budget report?  I ask because I distributed an advanced 
>budget report via e-mail recently.  It provided 3 sets of columns:  1) current 
>month, 2) YTD, 3) full year and for each set of columns, 
>budget/actual/difference.  I found it to be much more useful than the regular 
>budget report.  If we are going to have multiple "Advanced Budget" reports, life 
>will get tricky unless we can find a way to distinguish them.
>
> Phil
>---------
>I used to be a hypochondriac AND a kleptomaniac. So I took something for it.
>
>
>
>
>
________________________________
From: Christian Stimming <stimming at tuhh.de>
>To: gnucash-devel at gnucash.org
>Cc: Benjamin Johnsen <ben.johnsen at gmail.com>
>Sent: Wed, January 12, 2011 2:47:17 PM
>Subject: Re: New Budget Report
>
>
>Dear Ben,
>
>thanks for the interesting update. I was trying to run your report with the 
>most recent 2.4.0, but had to change a few lines until it was loaded correctly 
>at start-up. The changed file is attached.
>
>However, when trying to run the report I still run into plenty of Scheme 
>errors (below). Hence, the report in the current form probably cannot be used 
>with gnucash-2.4.0. If you feel inclined to fix those bugs, I would happily 
>include it into SVN so that  it can go into the next release, but currently 
>this doesn't quite work.
>
>Also, I suggest to submit your contributions as "enhancement request" in 
>bugzilla http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Bugzilla with the file attached, because 
>that way, your contribution doesn't get lost just as your 2008 email to 
>gnucash-devel did...
>
>Best Regards,
>
>Christian
>
>
>Am Mittwoch, 12. Januar 2011 schrieb Benjamin Johnsen:
>> Here is an update to the budget report that fixes some issues and adds some
>> new features.
>> 
>> See attached file.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Ben
>> 
>