New Person Questions

[Christian Stimming]

Aaron Goldblatt wrote:

> I have a couple of questions that I haven't been able to find sufficient
> answers for in the documentation or elsewhere, and I beg your pardon if
> they fall into the FAQ category.
> 
> I've seen in the past that the totals for gnucash accounts accumulate as
> one might expect, but in expense accounting the totals can become
> irritatingly large over a period of time.
> 
> Over a couple of years, the usefulness of this display becomes dubious
> at best.


Right. The balance display of income/expense accounts in the "account 
tree" is not really :-\ useful, I agree with that.

> How can I set up an accounting period so that accounts that should be
> zeroed (like expense accounts) or accounts that shouldn't be zeroed
> (like bank checking accounts) can have older transactions hidden from
> immediate view?   Archival of past balances and multi-period reporting
> would also be most helpful.  Does such functionality exist, and if so,
> what is it called so I can RTFM about it?


You might consider setting up a "Profit and Loss" report, and you can 
just leave it open upon terminating Gnucash. This report will re-open 
again upon next startup. Set the time interval to "Beginning of this 
month" and "Now" or whatever, and you get actually useful information :-)

> Next question:  I'm using 1.6.5 packaged for SuSE Linux 8.0.  (Is there
> a 1.6.6 version around somewhere that someone has actually gotten to
> compile?)  When choosing some of the reports (Reports:Utility:Welcome
> Extravaganza, Reports:A&L:Net Worth Bar Chart, and others), GnuCash
> crashes without error or a core file.  No log entry, doesn't clean up
> the file handles, just crash-go-boom.


In other words, you haven't seen any working piechart/barchart in 
Gnucash? Then it's a problem with the graphical library we are using 
which is called Guppi. I'm running 1.6.6 on Suse 8.0 without problems. 
Maybe you need more GNOME packages which you can get on 
http://www.suse.de/en/support/download/gnomes/i386/update_for_8_0/index.html 

Install Guppi from the application series plus anything that it requires 
(My guess: bonobo, oaf, gal, gdk-pixbuf, but maybe also others).

> Is there an archive of gnucash-user and gnucash-devel that has a decent
> search facility?  


Not that I know of. I usually google like "gnucash my question" and it 
finds to our archive surprisingly fast.

Christian