Profit and Loss Statement for Closed Books

[David Carlson]

On 3/21/2012 5:27 PM, Colin Scott wrote:
> 
>> Can anyone tell me how to produce a profit and loss statement for
>> transactions before I closed books.
>>
>> Everytime I go to reporting >> profit and loss, and select the 
>> dates for the closed books it just produces a P&L with £0's
> 
> 1.  The Answer
> 
> You need to ensure that you close the books on a date later than the last transaction of the old year, and earlier than the first transaction of the new year.  Usually this means that you have to tweak the dates of a couple of transactions.
> 
> 2.  The Rant!
> 
> Some reports have account selection options that permit you to filter out transactions from selected accounts.  Unfortunately, P&L reports do not permit this.  If they did, you would be able to filter out transactions involving Equity accounts, and that would solve your problem more simply.
> 
> There seems to be no rhyme or reason for some of the differences between the various pre-defined reports.  It seems obvious to me that all reports should include the account filtering facility, and I have to say that it would be sensible if their operation were standardised and rationalised so that instead of looking like a rag-bag assortment of "good idea at the time" one-offs, they were look like a properly planned reporting suite.
> 
> Colin
> _______________________________________________
> gnucash-user mailing list
> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
> -----
> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
> 


The comment about the rant... Actually, I would not call that a rant.
Some time ago on a similar subject I made a suggestion that reports
based on time intervals such as accounting periods use hidden dates in
between the end of one period and the beginning of the next.

Actually, that should apply to all histogram type reports, for example,
so that the last day of each month actually is the last day of each
month, and not a bad approximation, as we sometimes see now.

I think that code could be written so that there is no need to actually
build a fictitious calendar.  There may already be DLL's, subroutines,
Java Applets or whatever you want to call them to make this a relatively
painless coding project.

When a developer addresses Colin's issue, I would ask that this point
also be considered.

Thanks.

David C
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 0xDC7C8BF3.asc
Type: application/pgp-keys
Size: 1729 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/attachments/20120321/1f9fb9b5/attachment.bin>