Reporting - Was: Reliability of Gnu Cash software

Mike or Penny Novack stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com
Fri Mar 14 09:52:54 EDT 2014


>     I'm curious how you do this. The most common way I've seen
>     mentioned on
>     this list is to generate a transaction report, export that as
>     HTML, and
>     import it into Excel.
>
>     Because of the column alignment, this method requires much manual
>     work to
>     get it into a useful format.
>
>     What is your method of exporting raw reports?
>
The first thing to understand is that I expect to be doing a fair amount 
of editing in any case.:

1) Removal of detail inappropriate to what the board(s) would want to 
see. Keep in mind that the books themselves need to have the data broken 
out in ways that will make (governmental) reporting possible but that 
might not in all cases be how the board(s) would want to see it and vice 
versa. Some details might be moved around.
  Example --- the 990/990-EZ has  a line item for postage. But the board 
might want to see the postage cost for the annual meeting as part of the 
annual meeting total; the cost for election posting under election cost, 
etc.

   Compared to that, sliding things left or right to make them line up 
is trivial.


2) Annotation. Any unusual items/amounts getting a footnote. Board 
members present at the meeting can have a verbal explanation but maybe 
not all present.

3) Fixed text  (that of course is easy to add in since fixed, but again 
a job for a standard editor).

I don't find this a great deal of work as none of the boards meet more 
frequently than quarterly. I have help with formatting the annual report 
(which compares years as is normal for non-profits)

Gnucash exports to an html file. I don't see how describing the editing 
process I use beyond that point is going to be of much help since we 
each have our favorite editing applications <<for example, I don't have 
MS Excel on any of my machines>>  I also don't keep books for any 
organizations large enough to be producing PRINTED (real printed) annual 
reports. If I did, then after the "word processing" level editing would 
be a step of "compositor" editing for "pretty" typesetting.



Michael


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