Start Day of Weekly Report

[Michael Hendry]

> On 1 Jul 2015, at 15:10, John Morris <johnjeff at editide.us> wrote:
> 
> Hi Michael,
>  Thanks for your thoughts. Yes, I did restart the computer during this process. I just checked again after another restart overnight with no joy. The Reset Defaults button appears to restore all the settings of the visible tab to their default values when clicked. I clicked Reset Defaults in each of the tab of the Report Options. Of course, this eliminated the report because no accounts are selected by default. Then I went back and just set the sorting to Date with Weekly subtotals and added the Asset accounts to the report. This returned me to the same place I was with subtotals starting on Sunday.
> 
>  I don't think this would be cause by GnuCash picking up a setting when it is first installed. Here's why: We replaced our computers last December. As part of my usual practice, I always take about a week to put together a base operating system on an external hard drive so I have a backup in case something goes wrong. Then I install the applications and test them to be sure each one works. Then, finally, I copy our data over to the new build and install it on the computers after final testing. The start-of-week setting gets applied when I build the base operating system and GnuCash is one of the later applications I install. Therefore, there should have been many restarts between when I set the start of the week and when I finally got around to launching GnuCash for the first time.
> 
>  I, too, am at a loss about this. I don't know what could be blocking this setting on my computer when it clearly works properly on your computer. Would you mind running a small test for me? It would be interesting to know if it works for you to switch the start-of-week setting on your reports: If you set up a new user and confirm that the start of the week is set to Sunday (or some other day), created a test file in GnuCash with a few transactions and then ran a report, it should give you subtotals from Sunday (or whatever day you chose) without messing with the settings for your main user and your live bookkeeping data. If you then describe your steps in excruciating detail, I might get a clue as to why my changes are not doing the trick.

OK. I’ve set up a new user, and changed the System Preferences setting for the start of the week from Monday to Sunday.

I then downloaded GnuCash 2.6.3, installed it, and set up a new account, accepting all the defaults.

I then set up a single transaction from the Checking account, with today’s date, and asked for a Transaction Report on a weekly basis from 1st to 31st July.

This report came up running from Monday to Sunday (starting with Monday 29th June) - which is not what I had expected! If Gnucash is picking up System Preferences, it should have “noticed" that I’d set up Sunday as the first day of the week, and run the weekly report from Sunday 28th.

Knowing nothing about how this is managed internally, I have another little theory which will probably be knocked down - that there are default settings for a new user which are stored even though the user has made changes. Gnucash is looking at the default settings, not the current ones, so picks whatever would have been the default for a given user when that user was created.

I haven’t rebooted since setting up the new user, but I suspect the result will be the same. I’ll report back if the new user’s behaviour changes after the next reboot.

Michael


> 
> Thanks,
> John
> 
>> On Jul 1, 2015, at 3:46am, Michael Hendry <hendry.michael at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> That knocks my theory on the head, John - my theory that a bug had crept in after 2.6.3 is clearly wrong.
>> 
>> I expect you will have restarted your computer at least once in the process of this investigation - in case a setting related to week-start-day is picked up on start-up and not revised in the light of changes in System Preferences.
>> 
>> I’m not sure what they do, but there’s a button in each of the tabs of Transaction Report options marked “Reset defaults”. Have you tried these?
>> 
>> Not knowing about the internals of GnuCash, I wonder if GnuCash picks up the week-start-day when it is first installed, and doesn’t check it again - could you have installed your first version of GnuCash with Sunday as the week-start-day and established this in a profile somewhere which is impervious to later corrections? You did say that a number of settings had been inherited by the newly installed 2.6.3.
>> 
>> Beginning to run out of ideas here!
>> 
>> Sorry,
>> 
>> Michael
> 
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