CashFlow report with a month-by-month display?

[Andrew Sackville-West]

Jeff Smith wrote:
> As reported in an earlier email, I'm using GnuCash to try to get a 
> handle on household spending. As part of that, I would dearly love to be 
> able to generate a report that showed each of my expense categories and 
> a month-by-month total for each.
> 
> I understand that this could be done by exporting to an Excel 
> spreadsheet, but I figure that if it's useful once, it will be useful 
> regularly. And furthermore, if *I* find it useful, chances are that 
> others will find it useful too.
> 
> The existing Cashflow report does what I want, except that it only shows 
> one period at a time. This isn't a complete enough picture for me to get 
> a clear picture of the trends involved, so I'd like to turn it into a 
> multi-column report that shows me each month in a separate column. (And 
> printing out one report for each month in question seems a bit "brute 
> force" to me.)
> 
> Since I am not shy about having to write some script code, I figured 
> that I would dig into the engine and try to create one based on the 
> existing cashflow specification. But before I try that, I wondered if 
> somebody might have already done this, or if perhaps there's a way to 
> get what I want interactively, rather than going to code.
> 

use a multi-column report (Reports -> Sample & Custom -> Custom 
Multicolumn Report). It will come up blank. click the Options button 
which allows you to set up how many columns/rows and what reports to put 
in. Then after it rebuilds the report, there is a link to "Edit Options" 
at the bottom of each column. Select that to adjust the date parameters 
for each column. Its a pain as the whole rebuilds for each change, but 
once it done and set up the way you like, its easy.

A