Selecting Date Range to view

Brandon Kuczenski brandon at 301south.net
Mon Aug 15 18:10:24 EDT 2005


On Mon, 15 Aug 2005, Derek Atkins wrote:

> Did you try the "Transaction Report"?  It sounds like this is what you 
> want. You'll just need to configure the settings for what you want.
>
> As for the P&L being "non-intuitively named", I should point out that 
> it's been renamed to the Income Report in the next major release..  But 
> also "Profit and Loss" is a fairly standard business report.
>
> -derek


First, I'm assuming you mean "Account Report", since "Transaction Report" 
only reports on the currently selected transaction (I suppose this is 
another business-related feature, since it doesn't provide any more 
information than simply viewing that transaction in the register).

Preparing an "Account Report" requires me to select the date range for the 
account in advance before generating the report, and then doesn't contain 
any more information than the register itself contains, except for 
printing out net totals at the bottom.  It's an awfully small payoff for a 
substantial amount of mousework.  Plus, it still has the distracting, 
lifetime-accumulating "Balance" which I still believe doesn't make sense 
for an income or expense account when a date range is selected.

In any case, it is way too much work, unless there is some feature to 
globalize the "Date Range" selection -- what I would really like is to see 
this information for a number of accounts, or for all of them, without 
having to spend about a minute preparing each account individually.

So, I guess the proposed 'bug report' would be to change the way 'balance' 
is calculated for income or expense accounts when a date range is 
selected.  The proposed 'feature request' would be to offer a global 'date 
range' setting in the main window.  The long-term 'project' would be to 
write a new report template that would compile a number of 'account 
reports' for a single user-specified date range on a single report.  The 
accounts included would be selectable just as they are for other 
main-window reports.

Is there community interest or support for any of these?

-Brandon


>
> Quoting Brandon Kuczenski <brandon at 301south.net>:
>
>> Hello, Gnucash community.  I switched over to Linux a few months ago and 
>> have been using Gnucash as a replacement for Quicken 98.  Philosophically, 
>> I like it much better (particularly the double-entry accounting).  I am 
>> currently using version 1.8.10 on a Debian system.
>> 
>> One feature that I feel is lacking is an analog to a Quicken feature I used 
>> quite often: simply, the ability to display all the transactions from 
>> certain or all accounts from a certain period as an itemized list 
>> (Quicken's "Itemized Categories" report).  I have not found any way to 
>> replicate this functionality in Gnucash.  The closest I can get is a 
>> (non-intuitively named) 'profit and loss' report over a specified date 
>> range, but that does not show individual transactions, only their sums 
>> by-account.
>> 
>> The next-closest feature is "View -> Select Transactions -> Date Range" in 
>> each individual account window.  Though cumbersome, this would be 
>> sufficient EXCEPT: I believe that for Income and Expense accounts, when the 
>> Date Range is selected, the account's 'Balance' should start at zero at the 
>> beginning of the range.  This doesn't make sense for asset or bank 
>> accounts, but for income and expense accounts I believe it does -- since 
>> they don't really have true balances.
>> 
>> After that change, I could easily see at-a-glance how much money I spent 
>> from a certain account (c.f. Quicken 'category'), say, in August of 1998. 
>> As it is now, I have to set the date range and subtract the initial balance 
>> from the final balance myself.
>> 
>> What do you think of that?  It seems like the coding change would be 
>> near-trivial, though I haven't actually looked.  Does this seem like a 
>> reportable 'bug'?
>> 
>> As a possible extension, might it make sense to select a Viewable Date 
>> Range that is universal to all accounts, rather than or in addition to 
>> having a per-account viewable range?
>> 
>> Thanks for your development efforts.  Without this program it would not 
>> have been practical for me to switch from Windows.
>> 
>> -Brandon
>> 
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