Receivable Aging error

Charles Day cedayiv at gmail.com
Fri Aug 29 18:06:28 EDT 2008


On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 1:13 PM, <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:

> Quoting Charles Day <cedayiv at gmail.com>:
>
>  At least for 2.2.7, I think I should change the reporting system back to
>> using a default date of 'today'. For reports that allow you specify a date
>> range, I will definitely keep the default start date as "beginning of
>> period" (in 2.2.5 it was "beginning of year" which threw users with custom
>> periods off), but I can change the end date back to 'today'.
>>
>> This will fix the immediate problem with the aging reports, though they
>> probably would be better off making their own default instead of relying
>> on
>> the reporting system's default.
>>
>
> I think there are two types of reports -- reports against the period
> and reports-to-date.  I think we need to take a close look at each report
> and determine which category it belongs in.
>
> The aging reports definitely belong in the reports-to-date category
> so they should default to "today".
>
> The P&L definitely belongs in the report-against-period.
>

OK, so you're saying it is OK for the P&L to include future transactions by
default. That's the way we have it now in 2.2.6.

The 2.2.6 default is to treat every report as being in the "against the
period" category. Reports that allow the user to specify a date range
default to 'beginning of period' to 'end of period'. On reports that only
let the user specify an end date, the default is 'end of period'.

Since these defaults don't work for reports in the "report-to-date"
category, like aging reports, how would you suggest fixing it?  It would be
quite easy to treat reports that use a date range as
"report-against-period", and all others as "report-to-date", but I don't
know if that's quite correct. That would mean, for example:
Default balance sheet: today
Default income statement: period
Default trial balance: period

But there are some reports (and charts) that would not fit either of these
categories, since they involve a series. For example, the Net Worth barchart
is essentially a series of balance sheets. So even though its options
involve a date range, I would think that the preferred end date would be
'today'.

So it seems to me that reports could be categorized at least four ways:
"range", such as income statement, where the user can specify a start and
end date
"snapshot", such as balance sheet, where the user specifies a single date
"series of ranges", such as income and expense barchart, or a multi-column
income and expense (if we had one), where the user specifies a start date,
end date, an a step size
"series of snapshots". such as net worth barchart, where the user specifies
a start date, end date, and a step size

Perhaps if we can decide on defaults for those four types (are there more?)
then I could start coding something up.

-derek
>
>
-Charles


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