Cross-reporting ?

[Derek Atkins]

"Thiers Botelho" <thiers at fosfertil-ultrafertil.com.br> writes:

> About your example of grouping, below:
> 
>         Expense:Medicine:Mary
>         Expense:Medicine:Chuck
> 
> I understand it allows me to group all Medicine expenses. But will it do 
> any good when I try to group Chuck's Medicine with Chuck's Food ?

Somewhat, yes.  Certainly it's possible, theoretically..  I've never
tried using this approach, so I don't know how easy or hard it is to
do this.

May I suggest you install gnucash (1.8.4 is current) and spend a day
or so playing with it?  It might help you understand what it offers
better than I can explain it.  In particular, many things are
possible, but that does not imply that it is easy or intuitive to
accomplish.

> And when you say
> 
>         It means the code that exists today doesn't do it, but writing the
>         code to add this grouping is _relatively_ simple...  The reports 
> are
>         easily changed (even easier if you know scheme).
> 
> I understand that you mean that in the future, some programmer might add 
> this feature (I'm not a programmer BTW), but's that's beyond reach for a 
> normal user right now. Is that so ?

Well, the reports are a bit easier to grasp (IMHO) and modify by "non
programmers"..  Yes, you still have to write code, but you don't need
any kind of development platform.  The reports are written in scheme
(which is, admittedly, a programming language), but it means the
report code is more accessible to the average user.

We've had a number of "non programmers" submit reports over the years.
Generally they look at an existing report, find the online scheme
documentation at www.swiss.ai.mit.edu, ask a few questions for
gnucash-specific hooks (if those hooks aren't already in existence),
and make the changes they need/want.

For example, adding the ability to sort by "Action" would be rather
straightforward in the transaction report -- assuming the basic
transaction report meets your needs.  Unfortunately I can't answer
that unless you take a look at that report, I can only guess that it's
what you're looking for.

> Thnx
> 
> Thiers

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available