Cash Flow analysis: implementation details

[David T.]

I'm not sure you got your answers (BTW, I top post all the time. People probably hate me, but the reader I have for this doesn't demarcate previous content, so my additions would get lost. Such is life).

With regard to (1), I assume you've seen others lament the challenges of selecting all accounts in the tree. Unfortunately, Gnucash makes you earn the right to see all your accounts.

With regard to (2), it was my understanding that you wanted historical information about your spending, which would not entail averaging. The averaging you mention is a budgeting feature, which I have done in the past, but so long in the past that I have no recollection how I handled it. I do recall that you can set your budget amount both by averaging older data and by entering individual amounts. 

It is also possible to specify particular accounts in both in the budget AND the budget report. Assuming that your unique transactions are entered into separate accounts, you can omit those accounts in your output.

HTH, 
David




________________________________
 From: C. Andrews Lavarre <alavarre at gmail.com>
To: David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> 
Cc: "gnucash-user at gnucash.org" <gnucash-user at gnucash.org> 
Sent: Tuesday, June 4, 2013 1:50 PM
Subject: Re: Cash Flow analysis: implementation details
 

Hello thanks. Not sure if I'll get yelled at for top posting, but seems
better to me without repeating all that has gone before, just the
relevant parts...

Working on the citation, thanks, have gotten to the point of getting
what looks like the sort of thing for which I wish.

However, some remaining questions:

1. How to select ALL the accounts at once without wading through and
expanding each parent account one at a time

    a. You can select a parent, hit Shift+Ctrl + RightArrow and it will
expand all sub accounts, but you need to repeat this for each parent
account. I explored

    /home/andy/.gnucash/accelerator-maps

    but find no hotkey for expanding all accounts at once.

2. How to have the budget amount set to be the same for each month.

    a. What it looks like is that GC averages the actuals for each
*particular* month vertically across the years in the allowed date
range, rounds it to the specified significant figures and presents the
result as the budget for that  particular month. The apparent assumption
is that there are multiple years of actuals data, so we'll average and
round all months of March and give the rounded average as the budget for
March, do the same for April, and so forth.

     Since my circumstances changed significantly last year, I only
allowed the range from last October onward, so of course it only has a
single datum for each account/month. So of course it just presents the
actuals rounded to the specified significant figures.

    I'm inclined to think that it would be better to average each
account actuals across *all* months *horizontally* of the allowed date
range and then present that average as the budget.

But whatever, progress. At least we can extract the actuals and then do
that for ourselves with a spreadsheet.

Interesting learning afternoon, thanks again.

Cheers, Andy

On 06/03/2013 06:57 PM, David T. wrote:
> Try looking at the first tip here:
> http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Using_GnuCash#Reporting_Tips