Cross-reporting ?
marthter
marthter at yahoo.ca
Fri Jul 11 19:18:31 CDT 2003
Derek Atkins wrote:
>"Thiers Botelho" <thiers at fosfertil-ultrafertil.com.br> writes:
>
>
>
>>Well Derek,
>>
>>summing up from your own words . . .
>>
>>
>>
>>>Well, you could do this by naming account's "Mary's Medicine", but then
>>>you couldn't search for "all medicine accounts".
>>>
>>>
>>--means I can't group sub-accounts from different accounts ,
>>
>>
>
>Well, it means you can't group them if you name them this way. If, however,
>you named them:
>
> Expense:Medicine:Mary
> Expense:Medicine:Chuck
>
>Then you could group them more easily...
>
>
I have hit this question every time I've helped a friend with their
initial accounts setup in GnuCash. Basically you have to decide which
distinction you think is more fundamental for the way you want to track
things. Then you will either do:
Expense
Medicine
Mary
Chuck
Dining
Mary
Chuck
OR
Expense
Mary
Medicine
Dining
Chuck
Medicine
Dining
Assuming he did the first option, his goal is (if I am understanding
correctly) sometimes he wants to see the totals of all Medicine
expenses, and sometimes he wants to see the total of all Chuck expenses
(which he calls "cross-reporting").
Still assuming he did the first option, he could get the totals for
medicine and dining expenses simply by looking at the balance of the 2nd
level accounts Expense:Medicine and Expense:Dining. To get totals for
all Chuck expenses, he could use the Account Summary report, and in the
report Options (Accounts tab), choose only the Chuck accounts (and their
parents) thoughout the tree, and deselect the "always show sub-accounts"
check box.
It is a fair bit of clicking to select only the Chuck accounts, but the
report can be saved, so it would only have to be done once (and adjusted
whenever he added a new Chuck subaccount somewhere).
It seems to me this does what he wants, or else am I misunderstanding
his requests.
The Action field would also be a cool feature to do this type of report
automatically. But I gather that is not implemented yet.
Cheers.
~Martin
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