Possible bug with Cash Flow Report
Mike or Penny Novack
stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com
Sat Nov 7 07:50:07 EST 2009
I'm going to address this in more general terms
>>Ok, I think I get it. Please allow me one follow up. I believe
>>what you and others are says is that:
>>
>>1) There is no bug, the cash flow statement is reporting what it
>>should 2) The transactions were properly recorded
>>
>>The question boils down to: Is it your opinion that everything is
>>fine with this transaction, or should I have recorded it
>>differently.
>>
>I'm assuming that the credit card payment is shown in the Cash Flow
>Statement as an outflow of cash. If so, then I don't think there is
>any bug and that what you did is, I think, acceptable.
>
>In a larger company, a personal expense charged to the company and the
>decision to apply the resulting receivable against the loan from
>shareholder may have been recorded separately. That means that the
>company would have offset the credit card charge against a receivable
>from you and then made a separate transaction clearing the receivable
>and reducing the loan from shareholder. (The first is generally an
>administrative matter, the second often involves legal issues.)
>
>Jim
>
>
The PURPOSE of bookkeeping/accounting is information about the financial
activity. If there is a short sequence of transactions A=>B=>C such that
the net effect is just to A and C you saved time by shortcutting the
transaction as A => C but in doing that lost information. And that was
information which might have made clearer just what was taking place.
I wouldn't consider this just a big company vs small issue though as
explained the big company would have had additional reasons for stricter
adherence to procedures.
Don't be afraid to TEST. In a case like this where following taking a
shortcut reports did not seem to provide the expected information one
thing you could do is set up a "test environment" (copy of the data file
in a different directory) and then open this set of (test) books, back
off the shortcutted transaction and re-enter in full form, and now try
the report. If that restores the "missing information" you can make the
same change in your real books.
Michael
More information about the gnucash-user
mailing list