Reporting several financial years in the same table

[Mike or Penny Novack]

>I'd like to be able to compare (for example) this year's Balance Sheet with last year's (and possibly earlier versions) on the same report.
>
>I could resort to exporting the relevant years and cutting-and-pasting the results, but would have to be careful not to suppress accounts that are zero in one year and not in others.
>
>Is there a built-in way of doing this properly, or am I going to have to learn to code in Scheme?
>
>Michael
>
>  
>
Maybe neither?

When I began using gnucash for keeping the books of a 501(c)3 of which I 
am Treasurer this is the first question I asked the lawyer/accountant 
person who helped me prepare the annual report. That's because the usual 
way the financial report of a non-profit is presented is to show two 
years side by side, current and previous. Now I was a person who was 
making my living with financial systems software and a person for whom 
adding a new language no big deal (*). In other words, should I do this 
by designing a custom report? He told me "Don't bother doing that Mike. 
Just create and export the four gnucash reports the data of which 
constitutes the data for this report (two Income Statements and two 
Balance Sheet") and we edit these using the editor of our choice. Any 
accountant would do it that way." See, there is a bit more to the 
finished product to be edited in, some fixed text describing accounting 
methods/assumptions used and always varying annotations to draw 
attention to certain items/amounts that were unusual. Since a full 
capability editor was going to be needed anyway, why not use it for all 
of the job.

You have already noted one situation where it would be mighty hard for 
any automated report process to handle. Almost certainly going to 
require human decision where the account structure differs. Besides 
cases where accounts would be zero in one year but not the other you 
might have accounts not in the same place in the chart or not even in 
existence. There are other, more general considerations like level of 
detail desired. Thus you might find it convenient come tax related stuff 
for the raw books to have certain accounts delineated (like one for each 
"contractor" paid come 1099-MISC preparing time) but that expense only 
in the total for that expense category in the final report (the board 
would want to see how much was spent on "orchard expenses"  but which 
neighboring farmer paid to come in with their tractor to do the mowing 
or that work as opposed to seeding and later plowing in cover crop 
during new orchard preparation. Too much detail).

Some jobs computers do OK on but some we humans still do better (or 
writing a computer program capable of doing that task a LOT of work).

Michael D Novack







* well more precisely a new dialect of a language I already could easily 
read