Reports/Budgets with multiple time periods?

[Matt Benic]

   Hi Derek,
   Yes it's possible to go into the report options and choose a period,
   but it's only a single period.
   I would like to be able to compare (for example) the income, expenses
   and balance of my check account for say the past six months, with
   estimates for the following six months as well. Essentially I'm trying
   to achieve something similar to what the budgets seem to supposed to be
   doing. Here is an example from my spreadsheet to illustrate (my
   apologies to list members, the ASCII list version is likely to be a bit
   of a mess):

   December Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
   Check Account Income
   R 10,000.00 R 11,324.00 R 10,000.00 R 10,000.00 R 10,000.00 R 10,000.00
   R 10,000.00 R 10,000.00 R 10,000.00 R 10,000.00 R 10,000.00 R 10,000.00
   Expenses
   R 8,532.00 R 9,112.00 R 8,995.00 R 8,500.00 R 8,500.00 R 8,500.00 R
   8,500.00 R 8,500.00 R 8,500.00 R 8,500.00 R 8,500.00 R 8,500.00
   Balance R 10,000.00 R 11,468.00 R 13,680.00 R 14,685.00 R 16,185.00 R
   17,685.00 R 19,185.00 R 20,685.00 R 22,185.00 R 23,685.00 R 25,185.00 R
   26,685.00 R 28,185.00
   Flow
   R 1,468.00 R 2,212.00 R 1,005.00 R 1,500.00 R 1,500.00 R 1,500.00 R
   1,500.00 R 1,500.00 R 1,500.00 R 1,500.00 R 1,500.00 R 1,500.00
   Emergency Fund Income
   R 1,700.00 R 1,000.00 R 0.00 R 0.00 R 500.00 R 500.00 R 500.00 R 500.00
   R 500.00 R 500.00 R 500.00 R 500.00
   Expense
   R 0.00 R 500.00 R 0.00 R 0.00 R 0.00 R 0.00 R 0.00 R 0.00 R 0.00 R 0.00
   R 0.00 R 0.00
   Balance R 0.00 R 1,700.00 R 2,200.00 R 2,200.00 R 2,200.00 R 2,700.00 R
   3,200.00 R 3,700.00 R 4,200.00 R 4,700.00 R 5,200.00 R 5,700.00 R
   6,200.00
   Flow
   R 1,700.00 R 500.00 R 0.00 R 0.00 R 500.00 R 500.00 R 500.00 R 500.00 R
   500.00 R 500.00 R 500.00 R 500.00

   Another thing I would like to be able to do is 'subtotal' groups of
   account balances together without showing the individual accounts. As
   an example, if under my expense placeholder account I have a
   placeholder for bills which in turn has accounts for telephone,
   insurance, groceries, internet, etc, I want to be able to select the
   bills account to report on, and just see the balance for that
   placeholder, without seeing lines for the child accounts. Is this at
   all possible?
   Thanks,
   Matt

   Derek Atkins wrote:

Hi,

Matt Benic [1]<mattbenic at gmail.com> writes:


Hi all,
I recently moved all my personal financial data over from a collection
of spreadsheets to GnuCash (nice and easy thanks to the quicken
imports), and while the actual capturing and account management is
great, I'm really struggling to get the kind of useful information out
of the reports I was able to get with a couple of spreadsheets. I gather
>From posts in this mailing list that the budget functionality is pretty
much a write-off.

Essentially, in my spreadsheets I was able to total categorized
expenditure and income using selective addition, this equates to
reporting on individual accounts I have set up. I could then  have a
report with  past values per categories and forward projections on each
category and account balances calculated based on those past values. Is
this kind of reporting (essentially a report with data from multiple
time periods) at all possible in GnuCash currently?

I'm not quite sure I understand what you're asking here.  Yes, it is
possible to select which set of accounts get included in reports.  You
can also set the date range on the report.  All this is possible in
the individual Report Options.  But I'm not sure what you mean by
"multiple time periods".


Thanks,
Matt


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-derek

References

   1. mailto:mattbenic at gmail.com