Finally created that General Ledger report

Michael Hendry hendry.michael at gmail.com
Thu Jun 6 18:16:39 EDT 2013


On 6 Jun 2013, at 17:16, Theresa <TRost at ontera.net> wrote:

> Michael, David, I finally tweaked what each of you recommended until I was
> successful.  The trick really was to click on the parent account first
> (rather than "Select All") and then click on "Select Children".  (And then
> of course enter start and end dates, etc.)  Thanks so much for your help.

Don't mention it - I've had a huge amount of help from the list (largely correcting my poor knowledge of book-keeping principles, I have to say), so it's a pleasure to help anyone else.

> The package for my accountant is all coming together!!! Whoohoo!
> 
> Theresa

I've been trying this again, Theresa, and it doesn't seem to be quite as simple as I thought.

In order to ensure that all accounts are included in the report, it's necessary to have all accounts visible in the "Accounts" selection window, and click "Select All".

In practice, this means expanding all the account trees, so that there are no right-pointing triangles in the window - any account with children must have a downward-pointing arrow against it for this to work.

The "Select Children" button selects only the children of the most recently selected account, even if you select multiple accounts using cmd-click on the Mac (== ctrl-click on other OSs).

One little trap to watch out for, if you're using the Transaction Report to report (for example) on all of your expense accounts for a given financial year, is that when you opt to close accounts at the end of the year, every expense account is zeroed by transferring the expenditure to the Equity account on the final day of the financial year. It's clear what's happened in the report, but it may be confusing to see all your expenses added up to zero.

There's a workaround - if your year-end is 31st March 2013, ensure that any transaction you enter which occurred on 31st March 2013 is adjusted to read 30th March 2013. You can then set the date range for the report to run from 1st April 2012 to 30th March 2013, and the year-end adjustments will be ignored. [The workaround, and the reason why it's necessary, are explained in earlier posts].

Michael




More information about the gnucash-user mailing list