Credit card and cash-flow

[Matej Cepl]

Hi,

I have a problem. I am keeping our home accounting in GNUCash with the
current file beginning sometimes in the March of 2003. I was asked
yesterday by my beloved wife how much we spent on particular types of
items. "Wonderful", I said to myself, "finally the hours I spent typing
data in Gnucash will pay for!". Well, I cannot say that it is what
happened. See attached Cash-flow report (used as an advice from gmane.org
search of this newsgroup; BTW, the Czech is badly broken, but that's
another issue, which I do not want to deal with now). After looking through
the report I was quite surprised, that we spent just $18.40 on Dining,
because I am positive that we spent much more than that. I thought that and
my only conclusion is that GNUCash included all these expenses under the
account Liabilities/Accounts Payable/Credit Card, which is partially
correct (I paid most of our dining with the credit card), but generally
speaking it is very much misleading, because of course I want the the
credit card payments to be spread into different Expense accounts.

Other problem which I was not able to solve is that what I would actually
like to get is a monthly average on the individual accounts for the given
period. I have searched this group extensively, but basically the only
answer I've found is that I've got a tough luck and that it is not useful.
However, it seems to me that such report would be incredibly useful for any
budgeting. I am non-programmer, but I have written good number of small
scripts (Bash, Python, mainly). Yes, I know that it is a  Lisp-like Scheme
(and I hate zillion of nested parenthesis), but if it means just to add
couple of defuns into some existing report, that I think I could try to do
it. So, if there is some non-difficult way how to mangle the current report
to do that I would love to make an effort to do it -- any suggestions where
to begin?

Thanks a lot for any answer,

 Matej

--
Matej Cepl, http://www.ceplovi.cz/matej
GPG Finger: 89EF 4BC6 288A BF43 1BAB  25C3 E09F EF25 D964 84AC
138 Highland Ave. #10, Somerville, Ma 02143, (617) 623-1488

Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be
a completely unintentional side effect.
      -- Linus Torvalds
         New York Times, 28 Sept 03
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: report.html.gz
Type: application/x-gzip
Size: 2156 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/attachments/20041112/33f2092a/report.html.bin