[GNC-dev] GnuCash 3 on Linux

[Adrien Monteleone]

Derek,

I don’t disagree with your assessments of what certainly *can* (and maybe even, more often than not) be specific to a book rather than a user. I was thinking more along the lines of what someone *might* most likely want to carry over across multiple books. For example, I keep books for a few entities. Everything is in USD. (except for my personal book which has a smattering of left over currency from travels and some bullion I track as currency) I have no need for other currencies, and likely never will. At the least, I’d want to start books for a new entity, should one arise, with that same default currency in my reports. (simple enough since the default book currency is also the default report currency)

But I might also like to never show zero balance amounts or the corresponding accounts, and I might like to always roll up the sub account totals into the parent (since I set all parents as placeholders) and *not* show any duplicative ’total’ lines.

These were the types of settings I was thinking of that someone might want to carry over across all books and maybe even all reports. (where applicable) The same might very well applied to financial periods.

Separating preferences for reports is, I suspect, more useful to a multi-user environment, which GnuCash does not support, but can be useful for a single user who keeps books for multiple entities that are all in the same jurisdiction and might well even use the same CPA. (and certainly have to file the same tax forms) They might even all follow a July-June fiscal year, for example.

It might be that this is too small of a use case, and the user’s setup work so light that the development burden is simply not worth the effort. (and I’m by no means advocating for more work for the team already, I’m just chiming in with my own user story to consider.)

I started a project to map out report preferences as part of a revamp of the tab content and I didn’t finish it. Perhaps completing that project will offer more insight. (and very likely allow me to discover that the present situation is optimal)

Regards,
Adrien

> On Mar 7, 2019, at 10:14 AM, Derek Atkins <derek at ihtfp.com> wrote:
> 
> hi,
> 
> Adrien Monteleone <adrien.monteleone at lusfiber.net> writes:
> 
>> I’ll hazard a quick guess that everything not in the accounts tab is
>> non-book specific.
> 
> I'm not sure I completely agree with this statement.
> 
>> At the very least, the display and general tabs are not.
> 
> Maybe..
> 
>> How you want figures to be displayed, which sets of figures, which periods...
> 
> Different companies might have different periods; therefore, the period
> is tied to the book, not the person.
> 
>> Content settings may be tied to the book, but formatting settings are
>> likely to be the most likely to be used cross-book. I can certainly
>> see someone wanting all of their reports looking the same.
> 
> I mostly agree with this statement, but I think it depends greatly on
> the definitions of "content settings" and "formatting settings".  Sure,
> window sizes, tabs v windows, color schemes -- those are clearly
> formatting setting and should be per-user.  But "default currency",
> "periods", and certain parts of report configurations (e.g. accounts to
> include) are definitely content settings and belong with the book data.
> 
>> Regards,
>> Adrien
> 
> -derek