Cross-reporting ?

[Thiers Botelho]

Hi Martin,

Somehow you grasped exactly what my intention was. Congratulations on your 
perception.

Your suggestion is worth trying. There is a point that I'll have to see - 
after getting the final report in my hands: whether the "Account Summary" would have all the information I need. I suppose that, being it a 
summary, it would show only totals / subtotals but no individual 
transactions. But maybe a list of transactions wouldn't HAVE to appear on 
this particular report - I could see the transactions from another report.

Well, I suppose now I have to do my homework and install gnucash and do 
some testing. Besides the account summary as suggested by yourself, I'd 
also look at Derek's suggestions on customizing reports, including, as per 
his words, adding the ability to sort by "Action" .

Thnx

Thiers





marthter <marthter at yahoo.ca>
Enviado Por: gnucash-user-bounces at lists.gnucash.org
11/07/2003 19:18

 
        Para:   gnucash-user at lists.gnucash.org
        cc: 
        cco: 
        Assunto:        Re: Cross-reporting ?
>>--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.

~Martin