"Total" Balances.

[Jeff Kletsky]

Colin Scott wrote:
> The Accounts page has options for displaying various forms of balance for
> each account - eg, (leaving aside currency balances) plain Balance,
> Period balance, Present balance, Reconciled balance, Future Minimum
> balance, etc etc.
>
> There are "Total" version of these for the plain Balance and the Period
> balance, which include figures also from sub-balances.
>
> Other than "we just didn't do it" (and I'm not knocking that! :-) is
> there some good reason why there should not be totals for other balances?
> It strikes me that if one has sub-accounts it could be very useful to
> have Total Prsent and Total Reconciled balances, and I have no doubt that
> there are other users who would like other balances totalled too ...
>
>   

I already edited my 2.2.9 source to provide balance-to-date with roll-up 
over the sub-accounts. I find it very valuable. I'll probably add the 
same for budget and for budget variance once I get patches in for 
selecting a default budget. And then probably add it for month, quarter, 
and year to date. Hmmm, maybe rolling 30- and 60-day periods too.

I know, I could do it with reporting, but some things you just want "in 
your face" rather than having to wait for the report to generate, and 
having to generate it at all, rather than having it refresh when the 
data changes.

I think a good argument against it, as the UI exists today, is that 
there are already too many column choices and not any clear way of 
knowing what they do. I even don't remember my own column, was it 
"Present" or "Current" or... Cleaning up the UI design to make those 
selections better documented and clearer to the user would, in my 
opinion, be necessary before adding more column types. Perhaps even a 
different way to select the columns, rather than from a list ("building" 
them from options in some cases?).

Jeff