Year end reports

[Derek Atkins]

Quoting Terry Therneau <therneau at mayo.edu>:

>  Three questions/comments
>
>  1. I've been using Gnucash for the last 8-9 months, after ~10 years of
> Quicken.  (The DOS version, run in a Unix dosemu window --- why change when
> something works?  But I needed to upgrade to Ubuntu for other reasons, and
> couldn't get it to run.)   I'm having troubles with reports.  What I'd really
> like is what Q called "itemized category", which was a sum of all expenses by
> category/ subtotal by subcategory.  I do this to
>    The manual section that I can find on reports is very thin, lists 
> names but
> almost no detail.  Am I overlooking some documentation?
>    If not, what report would work?

Income Statement (used to be called the Profit and Loss report)

>  2. Even better would be the ability to export the data.  I would 
> read it into
> the S language ("R" is the GPL implementation, "S-Plus" the commercial one)
> and do my reports there.  This would make any number of summaries, 
> reports, or
> graphs very simple to create.  It happens to be what that language 
> was designed
> to do.  (I'm a statistician working in medical research.  Studies can cost
> thousands to millions of dollars, so the resultant data is looked at from
> every angle.)
>   My first try was to take the transaction report, choose options to remove
> subtotals, get the right columns, etc.  If I could save this as text it would
> be easy for me to import, but cut/paste doesn't work!  Parsing the 
> html is going
> to be a lot harder.  (BTW, reading a complete transaction report is how I got
> my data into gnucash in the first place -- my version of Quicken predated QIF
> output.  Read it into S, and then wrote my own qif).
>
>   What's the best way to output all the transactions from a given date range?

The transaction report and parsing the HTML.

>
> 3. The whole thread on "year end" has been fun to read.  Some comments
>
>  - I think that simple export is the best tool.  The package will 
> never contain
> all the reports that people might want, nor be able to support all 
> the packages
> that users might use.  My point 2 above is a good case: no one had 
> yet mentioned
> MY favorite language in the debate!  I will go back and look at the 
> gnucash to
> sql thread.  But if I could add one report it would be a "export 
> selected data
> as a text file".
>
>  - MikeorPenny Novak claim that all languages can be written well.  I think
> that there are some notable counterexamples.  APL, which I once knew very
> well, has been described as a "write only" code -- and I agreed with that
> statement even then, when I first fell in love with the language.  It 
> had many
> groundbreaking ideas, which thankfully influenced other languages which were
> not so unforgivably terse.  But the best counterexample has to be MUMPS, a
> language once popular in medical laboratory systems, and 
> unfortunately not yet
> quite eradictated.  Variable names are limited to 2 characters for instance,
> and all comments and extra spacing minimized to increase exectution speed.
>
>  - Lovers of Lisp and its offspring such as scheme are often passionate about
> the language's ease of learning, coding, and/or purity.  But they continue to
> remain a tiny fraction computerdom.  This will continue to severely restrict
> the gnucash developer base.  The number of potential contributers should be a
> part of your considerations on future code evolution.  Judging from the
> mailing list, 2-3 people currently carry a very large fraction of the load,
> which prompts both accolades for their dedication and worries for the future.

I'll point out that even though 80% of GnuCash is C (and Gtk), and really
the only parts of GnuCash still in Scheme are the QIF Importer and Reports,
I think that "Scheme" is a Red Herring in terms of lack of developers.
There's plenty to do for a developer who doesn't know Scheme and doesn't
want to learn Scheme.  But people aren't chomping at the bit to send in
code changes.

Personally I think that most people just don't consider a finance application
"Sexy".  I dont think that language has anything to do with it.

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-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available