Comparative Financial Statements

[Mike or Penny Novack]

> Sun, 21 Dec 2014 05:25:14 
> <9F002DF2-A7E1-4486-9F5B-20071E8F77C3 at gmail.com>  Michael Hendry 
> <hendry.michael at gmail.com>
>
> Have a look at Reports=>Custom & Sample=>Custom Multicolumn Report.
>
> I use this feature to prepare Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet 
> reports for the last three year-ends.
>
> Exported and tweaked for size, these single-sheet reports can each be 
> got legibly on to a sheet of A4.
>
> Michael

Because this is a matter where there are trade offs, I'll give the other 
solution. A "this year" vs "last year" is standard for the annual report 
of a non-profit, so when I switched to gnucash I asked the accountant 
type on our board if I should write a custom report. After all, my line 
of country as retired from writing financial system software. He said 
"Don't bother Mike, just run the Income Statements and Balance Sheets 
and we'll combine and format the data using my favorite editor. Any 
accountant would prefer doing it that way." Why?

a) Differences in level of detail. The actual reports form gnucash might 
be set up to make it easy for the treasurer to fill out necessary 
reports to governmental bodies but items combined differently for the 
board and public.
b) The chart of accounts might have changed so some rearrangement 
necessary for that.
c) Unusual items/amounts will have annotations added (footnotes)
d) There will be some fixed text.For example, as a non-profit can choose 
policy for "fixed assets" but that gets stated as part of the report and 
there other things like that which might need explanation (for many 
years we were carrying an INFORMALLY restricted fund -- morally but not 
legally restricted)
e) And of course we might have other editing concerns like fonts, 
spacings, etc.

In other words, he was suggesting that as the full power of an editor 
was going to be eventually wanted in getting to the finished product 
might as well use that from the start. I do something similar with the 
less formal quarterly reports too. Run simple reports within gnucash, 
export those, then combine with an editor where I have more control over 
the output.

Michael