New user feedback

[John Ralls]

> On Feb 22, 2015, at 4:04 PM, Bob Gustafson <bobgus at rcn.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> On 02/22/2015 05:48 PM, John Ralls wrote:
>>> On Feb 22, 2015, at 3:37 PM, Paul <p.matthews at inbox.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hello all
>>> 
>>> I admire what you are trying to do and wish to support you with some feedback.
>>> 
>>> My usecase: "We want to see whats happening to our money."
>>> 
>>> I downloaded and installed gnucash a couple of days ago because the need arose to manage our accounts. After connecting to online banking services and downloading all our transactions I got everything working perfectly. AWESOME!!  Problem solved I thought as I proceeded to the reporting to pull out some data for my partner...
>>> 
>>> What a disappointment. The stock reports are imo ugly and inadequate for our use case. We are interested in cash flow and the editing options for this report are minimal. Very minimal.
>>> 
>>> Being a qualified programmer I investigated the options for customising our reports somehow. I quickly found the answer to all of my reporting woes. I have to learn not one, but two obscure programming langages, namely guile/eguile and scheme.
>>> 
>>> In conclusion: I can't be bothered. I will have a look for something else that can output beautiful, professional and, if necessary, customizable reports.
>>> 
>>> I will report back with my findings if you like.
>> Actually, Guile and Scheme are the same language.
>> You might consider the SQL backend; one variant, SQLite3 requires no server. Using that instead of the default XML backend will allow you to query the database with standard SQL tools and use a SQL-based report writer to generate prettier reports.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> John Ralls
> 
> That is a great idea John - SQL report generation is quite a flexible solution.

I forgot to throw in the usual caveat: There’s at least one spot in the current release, the company information on the Business tab in the File>Properties dialog, that isn’t correctly synced to the SQL backend. That’s fixed for the next release, and in the meantime you can use File>Save As to force a complete rewrite of your database to save it if you need to. There may be other bits that I don’t know about, though I just did another thorough audit and I didn’t find any. Also you mustn’t write to the database except with GnuCash as all of the business logic is in GnuCash, not in the database. We haven’t even declared foreign keys in the database tables.

Regards,
John Ralls