Finding or creating monthly and quarterly report forms

[Mike or Penny Novack]

>I guess the truth of that statement depends upon how much customization you need. If it fits within the built-in customization options for the existing reports in question, see
>http://www.gnucash.org/docs/v2.4/C/gnucash-help/Reports.html
>
>If you need to create new reports or modify existing ones beyond what the built-in options provide, then it's not true. Programming is required, and it isn't easy.
>
>Regards,
>John Ralls
>  
>
This came up for one of the organizations for which I am treasurer when 
we switched to gnucash. The reports coming out of gnucash were not in 
the FINAL form for presentation to the board. I asked the fellow board 
member who is our lawyer type but also the treasurer of the law 
association's charitable org what to do about that. Whether I should 
code custom reports since in my case I was a programmer (a few hundred 
thousand line of financial software in my day). He told me "don't bother 
Mike".

The reason? He said that almost any accountant preparing the final 
version would surely prefer instead to use his or her favorite editor 
for that purpose using the DATA from the reports coming out of gnucash. 
makes sense as there is a great deal to add, the fixed text parts (that 
would be easy to do in a custom report) but also all the annotation 
which would not. Annotation  requires the power of editing software. Why 
reinvent the wheel (report editing capability within gnucash) when 
plenty of editors already exist.

How much extra work? Not a lot. It doesn't take a great deal of time to 
copy the data of an exported report into a document you can edit.

Michael