New Budget Report

Wed Jan 12 22:32:45 EST 2011

Phil,

Now that I am home and I have had a chance to get everything work again.

I have saved off an HTML version of my budget report.  It is an example with
a few dummy accounts setup.  See that attached file.

CSS and Javascipt could make for some really cool features in the reports.

Ben

On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 4:33 PM, Phil Longstaff <plongstaff at rogers.com>wrote:

> Hmmm....  Yeah.  Another useful column for my report might be "same month
> last year" and/or "YTD last year"
>
> Well, given a flexible enough engine, it would be easy to take column
> values from different years or different budgets.
>
> I like the colouring idea.  I think that ultimately, we might want a
> generic report engine which provides various things (columns, rows, totals,
> colouring).  Since we now have webkit which supports css and javascript, we
> can have collapsing columns and rows (e.g. expand/collapse the income
> section).  On top of this base engine, build a budget report engine.  On top
> of that, a budget report.
>
>
> 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:* gnucash-devel at gnucash.org
> *Sent:* Wed, January 12, 2011 4:16:25 PM
>
> *Subject:* Re: New Budget Report
>
> Phil,
>
> The YTD in my report makes the assumption that it is a YTD for current year
> not the year specified in the Start Date.  When I made that assumption I ran
> into an issue where I would want to analyze last years numbers to setup my
> budget for this year and my YTD would be showing me YTD for 2011 instead for
> 2010.  So instead of changing the YTD to be a YTD off of the year in the
> Start Date I create another column that call in called EOY and year can be
> specified for that column.  Mainly I used the EOY this time of the year to
> go back and analyze last year and close out all of my accounts.  I know that
> GNUCash has a close out end of year function but it doesn't close it out in
> the way that I like so I do it by hand.
>
> Sounds like a good idea to abstract away some of the complexity.  Another
> feature I had in my report is it would color every other column and every
> other row so that it was easier to follow a row all the way across the
> screen.  That would be nice to have in the engine.
>
> Thanks,
> Ben
>
> On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 3:52 PM, Phil Longstaff <plongstaff at rogers.com>wrote:
>
>> 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
>>> >
>>>
>>
>>
>