Budget reporting for a time interval

[Jim Passmore]

On Wed, Jul 1, 2015 at 5:33 PM, R. Victor Klassen <rvklassen at gmail.com>
wrote:

> When I run a budget report, at least the one I’ve found, I get the option
> of showing actuals, budget and differences, and the total for the year.
>
> But there doesn’t appear to be a way of asking for how I’m doing on (say),
> the first quarter, or the first five months of the year against projections.
>
> When I do get, if I want to see actuals, budget and differences, is so
> wide I can’t see it without scrolling, and then the accounts scroll off to
> the left, so I can’t see the totals for the year and the account names at
> the same time.
>
> What I would like would be something that looks like this:
>
> Account Actual  Budget  Difference
>
> ….
>
> where I get to select the date range, the accounts, and which year’s
> budget it’s based on.  All of these I have, except the date range.
>
> Am I missing something?  This seems like a very basic form of budget
> reporting.
>
> Optionally I’d like to have the specific months in the date range, but
> then I’d really want the left column to freeze when I scroll.   Maybe I
> have to copy it into a spreadsheet for that.
>

 Victor,
 I'm a new user, and budgeting was the biggest thing holding me back from
switching from an old version of Quicken to GunCash.  I would try it every
year to 18 months, and it just didn't have the functionality.  Finally,
this last time it was better, so I am using it for 2015.  Your issue is
essentially the same as one of mine.  I finally found on this list the
following discussion.
http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/Budget-report-enhancement-ranges-in-td4676146.html

In that conversation, there is a link to this enhancement to the standard
budget report.
http://blog.dnpavlov.com/2014/03/gnucash-budget-report-enhancement.html

This is the thing that made it work for me, but I don't recommend making
the changes exactly like the blog says to do.  If you do that, and then
update GnuCash, your custom budget report could get overwritten.  I dug
through more list discussions and the GnuCash documentation on reports, and
instead did the following.

Saved the SCM file from that blog to a new filename (I used
"partial_budget.scm")
Edited the SCM file.  Memory says the following lines:

"define module" near the top, to (define-module (gnucash report
standard-reports partial-year-budget))
"define reportname" near top, to (define reportname (N_ "Partial Budget
Report"))
"report-guid near end to 'report-guid "2dc4391feff4498210eec7982e317469"
** note this unique guid was created with the gnucash-make-guids command
line utility

Then edited the config.user file.  I actually had to create it, as I had no
custom configuration yet.  On my linux system I believe the path is
something like ~/.gnuchash/config.user.  (BTW, this is where I saved the
SCM file.)

In that file, I have the line
(load (gnc-build-dotgnucash-path "partial_budget.scm"))

Working on memory for this, so I hope that's all of it, and the details are
correct.  I now have the functionality described in the above blog,
alongside the standard budget report.  It shows up in the standard reports
menu.  At some point, I'm going to try to learn how the SCM formatting
works to add some white space into the report!

For more detail, see http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Custom_Reports


-- 
*Jim Passmore*
Linux User #232777