Receivable Aging error

[Charles Day]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 8:24 AM, Andrew Sackville-West <
andrew at swclan.homelinux.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 08:16:31PM -0700, Charles Day wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 11:24 AM, Karl Grant <karlgrant06 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > > On Thursday 28 August 2008 18:19:03 Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> > > > On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 08:29:52PM +0100, Karl Grant wrote:
> > > > > On Saturday 23 August 2008 20:53:32 Heather Daley wrote:
> > > > > > My husband just upgraded our computer and gnucash was upgraded to
> > > > > > 2.2.6, r17427.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Now when I run the Receivable Aging report, all amounts are
> listed at
> > > > > > 91+ days, including invoices I just prepared today.  The same
> error
> > > > > > occurs for the individual customer reports.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Has a bug report been placed for this, or should I file one?
> > > > >
> > > > > I noticed the same problem. This goes away if you change the date
> range
> > > > > of the report
> > > >
> > > > Describe exactly how you have changed the date range. Does any date
> > > > range change correct this problem? or is it only specific ones?
> > > >
> > > > A
> > > The default date on a receivable aging report was 'end of financial
> > > period',
> > > set on my computer to 'end of year', changing it to 'Today' correctly
> aged
> > > all
> > > amounts. With a bit of further messing about witht the dates I realised
> > > that
> > > it's correctly calculating the age based on the date of the report. So
> the
> > > problem lies with the default value (it probably should be today)
> > >
> >
> > For 2.2.6, the default 'end date' in the reporting system (not just the
> > aging report) was changed to 'end of financial period' as a part of the
> fix
> > for bug 542472. See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=542472
> >
> > The problem is that users can set a custom financial year, which may end
> > before today. On the other hand, it seems obvious that the aging report
> > ought to be run with a default of ''today'.  So we'll have to change the
> > default end date back to 'today', or give the aging report its own
> default,
> > or perhaps try to get the best of both worlds by defaulting to 'today' or
> > 'end of financial period', whichever is earlier.
> >
> > I'm not sure which way to go.
>
> my .02 is that the aging reports should default to "today". The age of
> an invoice really has no meaning relative to some day other than
> today. At least for most cases I can think of. If someone needs to
> know who old invoices were a month ago or will be 3 months from now, I
> expect that they would expect to have to change the dates for that.
>
> So I say change the default for the aging reports only.
>

Yeah, I think the aging reports should default to 'today' regardless of how
the accounting period is set. For other reports, I kind of like the idea of
making the date range end 'today' if the accounting period hasn't finished,
or the end of the period if it has. In other words, if the accounting period
has already finished, just report over the accounting period. Otherwise,
report period-to-date.

But I'm not sure... When you run a balance sheet and the period hasn't ended
yet, is it preferred to use period-to-date, or the entire period? The latter
would include any future transactions entered for the period, whereas the
former would not.


>
> A
>
>
-Charles