Reports/Budgets with multiple time periods?

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Matt Benic <mattbenic at gmail.com> writes:

> 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):

[snip]

> 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?

Well, ANYTHING is possible.. It's just a "simple matter of
programming".  If you're asking "do any of the current reports give
[you] this information?" the answer is probably no.  If you're asking
"could a report be written that provides this information?" the answer
is yes.  But it will require a little bit of scheme hacking to get
the report you want.  Luckily you do not need to rebuild GnuCash to
do this kind of hacking.

I realize this probably isn't the answer you were looking for, but keep
in mind that even when using your spreadsheet you had to write the
macros to perform the operations you want.  It's no difference here,
but with a GnuCash report you can share the results so that others
can gain from your endeavor!

Hope this helps..

> Thanks,
> Matt

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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