Reports/Budgets with multiple time periods?

[Derek Atkins]

Mike or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at mtdata.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):
>>  
>>
> Derek, I know exactly what Matt wants because it is very similar to
> what "we" need in terms of the standard way that "non-profits" report
> (side by side presentation of say the balance sheets for two dates
> along with the revenues/expenditures report (income/expense report)
> for the interval. I have put onto the low priority burner creating
> custom reports for this (sorry). The reason is that for proper GAAP
> reporting we need to also be able to ANNOTATE the reports and so are
> creating the reports "manually" (using the reports that GnuCash can
> easily produce as it stands). In other words, we would need an
> "application"  (one that read a GnuCash "books" file and produced the
> report giving the person using this a chance to add notes) as opposed
> to just a "report" within Gnucash -- and while writing such a thing
> "my line of country" it isn't worth the effort compared to the once a
> year chore of doing it manually combining the data from two Gnucash
> balance sheets and one income/expense report with the person doing
> that sticking in the "notes" as they went.

I'm sorry but I don't follow the reasoning for why you need a separate
application to create this report.  I don't see why it couldn't be
written in scheme as a GnuCash report?  Your explanation above does
not really provide a good rationale for the required separation.

I guess the only potentially challenging thing would be the annotation,
so I guess it does depend on how the report needs to be annotated.
But I can still imagine that you could put the annotations into the
transactions themselves (either as Transaction Notes or Split Memos
or something else) and then just display those in the report.

Still, this does require some Scheme hacking.

> But of course if I get bored enough I might do it.
>
> Michael

-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
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