Income Statement

[Mike or Penny Novack]

Jos wrote:

>Please design the following multi-column Income Statement: ........
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What are you expecting?

Let me start with a question. Are you unsure how you would use the 
existing Income Statement report(s) to extract the data necessary to 
build the report you want? Of course that would require you to construct 
the "finished product" report from this data using the editor of your 
choice. Or is the problem that you expect gnucash to come with a built 
in "ready made" report for this PARTICULAR "finished product" (as 
opposed to all the possible other "finished product" reports other 
people might require).

Because I do use gnucash for organizational books and because I am a 
retired senior analyst with decades of experience doing financial 
software this was a question I asked our organization's accounting/tax 
person (a board member actually a lawyer but treasurer of the 
nonprofit/charitable of the lawyer's association). He told me "Mike, 
don't bother to custom code this. I prefer to use my favorite editor and 
so would any other accountant". The reason is that there is MORE you 
want (you probably need to edit in any case).

Let's for a moment assume you had this report as you described and it 
was to be presented (to your board, etc.). Do you not see that in cases 
where that variance was very large you would be wanting to NOTE (either 
footnote or endnote) explanations?

Could there be as part of gnucash an "editor" that could take as input 
two Income Statements and construct from these the report you want? One 
allowing you to insert fixed text and notes? Of course there could be. 
But interactive editors are a big project all in themselves, they 
already exist, so why reinvent the wheel. Please look again at what you 
asked for in more detail to see all the little bits and pieces you left 
out. For example, you imagined ONE column for current and ONE for 
previous. Oh, your income and expense account trees aren't nested? But 
what of they were (probably the more general case). So you want some way 
in this built in report to control that (to flatten or not, how to 
flatten). In other words, there are LOTS of decisions anybody wanting a 
report as you described to make.

But back to the beginning. If you were doubting that gnucash as it 
stands could produce the reports with the necessary data, just run two 
Income Statements for the respective begin and end dates, export them, 
and copy the data from these files into the finished product document as 
you described. Yes of course a bit of fudging/adjusting. For example, 
you assumed that the accounts would line up 1:1 for these two time 
periods but clearly that is not necessarily the case as accounts could 
have been created in the current period that have no corresponding line 
on the previous.

Michael D Novack, FLMI