GnuCash

Dan Smith dansmith at byu.net
Mon Jan 23 16:33:33 EST 2012


On Jan 22, 2012, at 6:30 PM, John Ralls wrote:

> You can set up your various reports by selecting the appropriate accounts in the Options and saving them as Custom Reports.

Just guessing about what's wanted, but I think what's missing from GnuCash in comparison to the features in these other programs is the ability to automatically select accounts based on certain properties rather than manually selecting each account every time a new report is wanted.  Plus, ideally, the report would be dynamic, so that I didn't have to go back and update all my reports when I added a new account.

Right now the "Include Sub-Accounts" option provides a certain degree of automated account selection, but it's limited to the hierarchy, so it can't handle cross-cutting concerns like what is being requested here.

Personally, what I'd like to see is a many-to-many relationship between Accounts and "Groups"; features like placeholder accounts/hierarchies, the account type (Asset, Liability, Bank, etc.), and maybe even the "hidden" flag could be collapsed into Group-Account relationships.  The UI could present Groups both hierarchically (as in the Accounts Page) and as tags/keywords.

Of course, even if there was a general consensus that this was the right model, I doubt anyone is ambitious enough to try to redesign the whole application in this way...  Patched-on, modest support for tagging might have better luck.

—Dan


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