Average users *need* custom reports

[Maf. King]

On Thursday 01 July 2010 00:14:25 cognitive.libertarian+ml at gmail.com wrote:

> Those who have used commercial proprietary off-the-shelf tools know
> what I'm talking about.  The ability to simply get a report on fuel
> expenses between Jan 1, 2008 and Dec, 31, 2008, for example, is very
> useful.  But it would be naive to expect gnucash to have a pull-down
> menu item for "2008 fuel expenses".
>

> If someone needs to know the sum of expenses from 5 different (but
> similar) expense accounts, from March 17th, 2006 to May 3rd, 2009,
> where the funds are drawn from only one particular credit card, and
> perhaps only counting transactions with a particular substring in the
> subject -- how can you possibly expect the report to be "supplied" by
> gnucash?  Obviously a custom report is the only option.  In MS Money,
> creating a report that specific is *trivial*.  Just a few check boxes.
>

I haven't tried, but I think that the Transaction Report can mostly handle 
these cases, although I suspect that the substring matching is beyond present 
capability. 

I find the transaction report to me highly useful for general day-to-day 
reports, and use certain others at year end only.  In 7 years of using GC, I 
can only think of a couple of times where the supplied reports couldn't give 
what I wanted - one case was a (now fixed) bug in the receivables-aging when 
the year rolled over, and the other is the invoice templates and statements - 
functional yes, but not how I wanted them to look. I had a look at scheme and 
couldn't get my head around it.  I create the customer-facing paperwork in 
OOo, which does duplicate typing etc. but I seem to recall that was the way 
when I used Quicken on Win3.1/95/98 all those years ago.  I'm hoping that if 
I get the time, then some sort of OOo <---> MySQL solution might improve 
efficiency (eventually)....

I won't argue though, that once a report options have been set and saved, the 
inability to tweak and resave (or delete) the report is a limitation, and the 
saved reports *really should* be datafile specific - and no, I don't have a 
patch for that. :-P

Maf.