Reports: Include second column for previous period

[Mike or Penny Novack]

...only these reports do not allow this. A "Multicolumn Report" is 
essentially just a bunch or reports next to each other - destroying the 
easy overview from having the numbers directly next to each other. There 
is - to some extent - a workaround, using budgets. Only with budgets it 
is also quite tedious, because changing the budget period is slow. Also, 
it's layout isn't nearly as nice as the original reports. So, two 
questions: - has someone actually created a custom report that 
implements the above?

Rather I will describe what happened when we switched keeping an 
organization's over to gnucash and I asked the lawyer-accountant whether 
I should write a custom report for the usual format a non-profit does 
its annual report. He said "Don't bother Mike. Just produce the two 
Balance Sheets and two Income Statements (well a non-profit titles those 
Statement of Revenues) and we'll use my favorite editor to put all that 
together into the annual report. Any accountant prefers to do it that way."

OK, why you ask (I didn't have to, immediately obvious)
1) The fixed text portion. Normal to have accounting principles used 
expressed. For example, de minimus for fixed assets, depreciation 
schedule, etc.
2) Annotations  (going to have to use an  editor to stick these in anyway)
3) And what do you do if the chart of accounts doesn't match up exactly 
(changed one year to the next). Going to have to edit for that.

Michael

PS: And hey, this is just for a annual report printed by an ordinary 
computer printer. Now if this were a really big organization and the 
annual report printed in the 100,000's by a real print shop, after the 
initial editor phase would be ones for better editing control and then 
the matching compositor program (for a fine print job details)