Transaction Report

[Colin Scott]

If I enter a simple transaction like this:

<date> <ref no> "Cheques Received"
   <income account> "multiple payers"     <credit> £157.60
   <bank account>                         <debit>  £157.60
   
then on a Transaction Report for the bank account the details appear
pretty much as above.  Specifically, under "other account", the report
prints the income account name.

However, I often, for clarity of the accounts, enter transactions with
multiple splits referring to the same account.  For example, the above
transaction might well be entered like this:

<date> <ref no> "Cheques Received"
   <income account>  <first payer name>   <credit> £100.00
   <income account>  <second payer name>  <credit> £ 57.60
   <bank account>                         <debit>  £157.60
                
When _this_ transaction is printed on the bank account's Transaction
Report, then under "other account" it simply prints "split" instead of
the accout name.  Now, in single-line format that is fairly reasonable -
after all, what else could one do?  However, in mult-line format then it
ought really to print the other account names, even when that  account
name appears more than once, as here.  As it stands, the transaction
report is actually pretty useless for what I need it for (which is as a
printed record of the year's transacions for use by the auditors), as
once printed it does not give the reader sufficient information to follow
every movement through the system.

I should like to say that, despite the recent lengthy threads in which
the many alleged failings of the gnucash reports have been aired, this is
the first real fault I have found with them in nearly 2 years of use.  OK,
the reports are not perfect - but given the breadth of the audience they
must satisfy they never could be.  They are, however, in general
sufficiently flexible to produce something useful with a bit of
option-tickling, and when that fails one can usually export the data into
some other tool that will do what is required. 

No, I reserve my ire for the way in which custom reports are managed (if
that is the word!).  Why can we not have the basic simple management
facilities for report definitions that any reasonable user would expect
to find - ie Open (a selected report), Save (the current report,
replacing the previous definition), save-as, and delete (a selected
report) - instead of the deeply horrible kludge that is there now?

In my view if this aspect of the reporting system could be cleaned up and
made properly user-friendly (eg one should be able to save the amended
definition of a saved report, and saved reports should be visible
_without_ having to restart gnucash!!!) then a very large proportion of
the complaints about gnucash reports would simply disappear.

With many thanks.

Colin Scott