Construction loan and cash-flow report

[Dwight Tovey]

Derek Atkins said:
>
> The account types are correct... HOWEVER the cash flow report is
> including the "House" account but not the Loan account, so that's why
> you're seeing the inflated "Money In".  To fix this you should either
> include the Loan account in the report, or exclude the House account
> in the report.
>
> See the documentation for a better description of this report and how
> it works.
>
>>> and whether you have somehow excluded some accounts from the cash flow
>>> report.
>>
>> Ok, now this gets weird.  I originally just used the default Cash Flow
>> report, only changing the start date (Start of this month).  That gave
>> me
>> the values above.  I then went into the Options->Accounts view and saw
>> that the "House" account was selected, but the "Construction Loan"
>> account
>> was not.  In the report, the Loan shows up (in the Money In section),
>> but
>> the House doesn't.  If I select the Construction Loan, it disappears
>> from
>> the report.  If I then de-select "House", it shows up in the report
>> (giving me a negative cash-flow of -$70,232.73).  On de-selecting the
>> Loan
>> again, the "House" disappears from the report, the loan does not
>> re-appear, and I get the net cash-flow that I would expect.
>
> The report is behaving correctly.
>
>> Am I missing something here?  I would have expected that selecting or
>> de-selecting an individual account would determine only if that account
>> was included in the report.  I would not expect it to determine if some
>> other account was included or not.
>
> Yes, you're missing something.  Please see the documentation for this
> report.  I've also explained it multiple times on this list so please
> check the archives.  I suppose it should be in the FAQ, but last I
> heard that was down again.
>
> The report is behaving correctly.  The selected accounts choose which
> set of accounts you want to measure flow.  It creates two groups of
> accounts (selected and non-selected) and measures the flow _between
> the groups_.  Any transaction solely between accounts in only one
> group is ignored from the report.  Any transaction that touches
> accounts in BOTH groups is included the in the report.
>
> So, when you include House but not Loan, the transactions between
> those accounts get included in the report.  Whether it's Money In or
> Money Out depends on the direction of the flow.  If both accounts are
> select (or both are not-selected), that flow wont get shown.
>

Ok.  My apologies.  I remember seeing this explanation now.  I wasn't
seeing this problem at the time, so it didn't register.

I would rather see the transaction in my report, but still have the 0 net
sum.  From what you are saying then about the cash flow only reporting on
transactions that flow between the included and excluded groups, I should
be able to get this by the other scenario that I mentioned in my original
post on this and use two transactions instead of one:  Loan -> Cash,  Cash
-> House.  Then if I have both Loan and House in one group and Cash in the
other group I should see the transactions and get my 0 net sum?  Any
issues with doing it that way?

Thanks for the input.

    /dwight


-- 
Dwight N. Tovey
email: dwight at dtovey.net
web: http://www.dtovey.net/~dwight
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