The Experience Of Reports

[David T.]

After trying to update a monthly cash flow report for a couple of weeks now, I'd like to offer back a bit of my experience with the report-design experience.

To begin with, I've used Gnucash for a few years now, and find that it generally meets my needs, for which I am grateful. My major ongoing challenge is that the reporting features are not particularly user friendly. That is my charitable way of putting that. 

I have seen many requests on this list over the years for help with creating this or that particular report, and the usual response that the user gets is along the lines of: "That report is not in Gnucash, but if you learn Scheme, you can probably build it in a very short time. Scheme is a simple language to learn, and anyone can learn it in just a few days' time."

Unfortunately, that is misleading on a number of fronts. First, there's the whole "Scheme is a simple language to learn," which may be true for some, but is clearly not the most intuitive language. At least that's what I can take away from the lively discussion that took place on this list over the last week. Scheme may be the Greatest Language Ever, but it is not the simple stroll in the park that its proponents seem to think it is. The fact that it's not the Next PHP should make that clear.

Second, and perhaps more troubling to me, is that the problem of creating reports is not just a matter of learning Scheme; the poor report designer (also known as an end user) must also attempt to plumb the depths of the Gnucash APIs. As far as I can tell, the only source of documentation for these APIs is the code itself--which means that a report designer (end user) must now also be able to understand the full depths of Gnucash's source code (which I believe is in C, but don't hold me to that). 

So now, the end user who wants to write (or hack) a report in Gnucash must know Scheme AND the Gnucash code base, just to try and eke out their data in a new format. 

Which is why I believe that there aren't a raft of new reports coming in to the project from all those users who write in asking about whether this or that report is available in Gnucash. It's just too daunting. This is an unfortunate conclusion to the process, and is I think a very big issue for a lot of General End Users.

And that Monthly Cash flow report? I gave up on it. No one offered me any explanation of what I needed to do with the half-updated report to get it to run; I figure I'll have to make do with some form of a Budget report to analyze my expenditures. I spent a good bit of time trying to get the report to run, and failed. 

The irony is that I don't even know if the report would have given me the kind of information I wanted.

Sincerely,
David