Question on extracting analysis data from GnuCash

[Mike or Penny Novack]

Wirawan Purwanto wrote:

>I am using Gnucash to keep track of my personal finances. It is a great 
>tool to make sure that I am not running out of my money, and to record 
>every expense that I make. However, when it comes to analyzing the 
>expenses that I have made, I am having quite a hard time. I want to get 
>this kind of recapitulation for every month:
>
>* Food/grocery    $150
>* Electricity     $100
>* Telephone       $40
>
>... etc. This could be done near ideally using "Budget report". But there 
>are several shortcomings:
>
>1) for a yearlong budget, the resulting report is too long horizontally
>  
>
OK -- first off, a "budget" is for your PROJECTED financial activity. 
Your "books" show the actual activity. You then compare. Yes of course 
columns for each month on a full year comparison is going to result in a 
report too wide to fit on a sheet of paper. But that's not an 
application problem but simply the reality that our sheets of paper just 
aren't that wide. You have a number of possible solutions, beginning 
with things like asking GnuCash to produce quarterly (3 month) 
comparisons and then gluing these together.

>2) the output format is unfortunately too rigid: it only outputs to HTML, 
>and not editable. I want to tweak it here and there, e.g. removing some 
>expenses that are in certain account that is "special" (e.g. incidental or 
>out-of-ordinary expense).
>  
>
Not exactly sure what you mean by "can't edit". Are you asking us for 
the names of applications that can edit HTML documents? Yes of course 
you can't edit these with a "text" editor or a MS "doc" editor but that 
doesn't mean that you can't edit them. For example, I have no trouble 
opening an exported (in HTML) report with Open Office "Writer". Our 
organization's "legal"/"accounting" person has no difficulty getting the 
data from the reports (in HTML) that I send him as email attachments 
into the finalized document (GnuCash isn't producing the final version 
of the reports in GAAP format with all the annotation that gets stuck in)

>3) the account also shows the sum total including the subaccount sums. 
>While sometimes this is desirable, on my case I want to not include the 
>subaccount expenses to the parent account.
>  
>
Then don't ask for that. This is a "default" choice issue. The 
developers had to guess what most folks might want. But you aren't 
locked in to that. You first open (create) the report and then you 
select different display options. There is a great deal you can change. 
Mildly strange that you haven't discovered this yet since it is with 
this "options" changes that you define the effective dates for reports. 
Those aren't always (in my case never) done in "real time" so the date 
or the begin/end dates must always be set.

>Is there any way to extract GNUCash data via scripts, e.g. to a raw text 
>files, or to spreadsheet, or something like that? And if possible I'd 
>rather export the reports as CSV or Excel sheet or whatever format 
>machine-processable, rather than in HTML or printer-ready format.
>I could dive into the Scheme scripts and find out how the scripts 
>work and make my own solution, but this would cost a lot of time.
>
>  
>
"Any way" is too broad a question

Michael