Income/Expense report

Donald Allen donaldcallen at gmail.com
Fri Jun 12 11:44:30 EDT 2009


On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 11:34 AM, Stephen R. Besch<sbesch at buffalo.edu> wrote:
> Donald Allen wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 10:09 AM, Mike or Penny
>> Novack<stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Derek Atkins wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Quoting hendrik at topoi.pooq.com:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Suggesting that calling the "Income Statement" an "Income and Expense
>>>>> Statement" might have saved someone a lot of work.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> It was originally called the Profit & Loss report.  Then it was
>>>> completely renamed to Income Statement, which confused a lot of people
>>>> (and still does!).   So in 2.3/2.4 the P&L is coming back -- the
>>>> same report will have two different names.
>>>>
>>>> I don't remember who did the work so I can't point my finger anymore.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> Nobody's fault. By accounting custom, what this report is called depends
>>> upon the nature of the enterprise for which the books are being kept. So
>>> there is simply no one right answer that can make everybody happy. For
>>> the
>>> non-profit for which I keep books it's a "Revenue Statement". For small
>>> businesses usually "Profit and Loss" statement and as already mentioned,
>>> for
>>> larger ones usually just "Income Statement" (though of course it might be
>>> showing a loss for the period). For personal books perhaps "Income and
>>> Expenses" makes the most sense.
>>>
>>
>> I agree with this.
>>
>> I actually don't like the name "Profit and Loss", since you don't have
>> the two simultaneously, at least not at the bottom line. "Profit *or*
>> Loss" might be more accurate in that regard :-) But kidding aside,
>> while I can understand how the name "Income Statement" got chosen (as
>> described in my previous post), I think Michael is right that "Income
>> and Expenses" is best in Gnucash, especially given the number of
>> people confused by "Income Statement".
>>
>> /Don
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>> Michael
>>>
>>>
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>>
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>>
>
> I have always received complaints/criticisms/suggestions/etc regarding
> caption text in any program I've written. A while back I solved the
> "caption" problem by permitting users to put replacement caption text in a
> user configurable "captions.conf" file. The structure is simple: the target
> control's name followed by the desired custom text (optionally followed by
> custom tooltip text, but that's another issue). When the program starts up,
> if the file is present, any control names present in the file will have the
> normal (default) text replaced with whatever text the user has entered into
> the file. Any controls that do not appear simply have their usual captions
> left alone. The file has no language dependency, since it is assumed that
> the "customizing user" will have already put the text into his/her chosen
> language, and, since it is not included in the normal distribution, any
> changes survive across program updates. Then people can resolve all of these
> terminological issues to their hearts content.

But, if I am understanding what you have written correctly, it doesn't
solve this problem. People are trying to choose a report that has some
desired content from the set of names of available reports. So each of
those report names needs to provide the best clue as to what it does
(assuming no tool-tip and that people aren't doing this with a copy of
the documentation in hand). So the issue is not that people want to be
able to customize the names of the reports; it's that they need the
most help in initially finding the report that produces the content
they want.

/Don



>
> Stephen Besch
>


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