Trouble setting accounting period

[elvis]

On 06/02/14 08:52, Mike or Penny Novack wrote:
>
>> Yes, that will work but what Anthony, myself and others are doing is
>> also correct practice. It's just that it's no longer working.
>>
>> Reports we want to produce are for the 'accounting period' which only
>> needs to be set once per year - or at least that used to be the case
>> until something broke in the past year, probably with the introduction
>> of 2.6.0.
>>
>> I suggest you don't be quite so patronising when next you respond to a
>> request for assistance.
>>
>>
> Sorry
>
> But maybe you will explain HOW just setting "accounting period" could 
> decide the date for a report in general.

Easy. If I want last financial year, I know exactly what i want and I 
use that in the drop down box. I get the P&L starting from 1/7/2008 
instead of 1/7/2012.

Maybe where it is defined should be more generic and not have years, 
only months, then it could be used like the parameters - beginning of 
previous month, end of last quarter etc. This would be more useful than 
a static year.

It would be I imagine a pretty common report to want, last financial 
years P&L and if you want a different year then you have to set it 
manually. My other use case is getting a ytd P&L, I would love to be 
able to use start of accounting period with that too.

Lawrence


>
> Let's take Balance Sheet as our example. How does the computer 
> (knowing only what YEAR you want that report for) read your mind to 
> figure out what DAY in that year you wanted that report for.
>
> Or take an Income Statement. Did you want that for start of year till 
> today (when you are running the report) or as of the end of the last 
> quarter a few days ago?
>
> It is only in the very special case that you were ALWAYS running in 
> "real time" that you could get away with not specifying the effective 
> dates for a report. Now before I retired I did large financial system 
> software for one of the largest financials in the world. Not only were 
> we not always running a program in real time but some of the hardest 
> errors to find/correct were from when there was a real time dependency 
> (because does NOT reproduce until/unless you remember that and correct 
> for the fact that you are now running later).
>
> Always explicitly specify dates!
>
> Michael
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