Report: Balance Sheet (et. al.)

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 3/18/2015 8:51 AM, YeOldHinnerk wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was playing with the balance sheet report options today a bit. What I
> wanted was to remove the short-term liab accounts from the report. Of course
> without changing the sum of the parent(-placeholder) account of short term
> liabs.

> It turns out that:
> 1. As the short term liab accounts are the same level as some other accounts
> I do want to see, I can not (solely) use the tree level for selection.
That is YOUR choice. The COA is under your control. So ONE possible 
solution (if you want to use levels) is to insert enough levels in between..
> 2. If I keep the current level, but deselect the individual short term liabs
> accounts, the parent account of short-term liabs gets a sum of zero. I
> verfied this with the various options concerning higher level accounts and
> amount-zero settings. I didn't find a combination that fixed this.
You almost certainly don't want to do that. Using the Balance Sheet 
report with only some accounts included might be useful for some purpose 
other than an ordinary Balance Sheet. Yes dangerous if you don't know 
exactly what you are trying to do and imagined that the result WAS a 
"Balance Sheet"


In the title I wrote "et.al." since I wouldn't be surprised if this same 
behavior appears in other reports as well, e.g. income statement. I 
didn't try this though. So my questions are: 1. Is this behavior intended?

Probably yes. That allows the report generating code to be used for 
OTHER THINGS besides producing the report as the name of the report 
implies. For example, I might want to create a report for one of my 
boards on just the income and expenses related to that event (how much 
profit did it make or how large the loss)

Suggestion: Why are you considering the raw report the finished product? 
You can't obtain more levels of detail than your COA supports so you 
must define that to support all the levels of detail you need for any of 
your purposes. One solution I use (for all of my non-profits) is to have 
the COA support what I need as treasurer to complete various state and 
federal filings but reduce that detail in the reports presented to the 
boards of directors according to what they want to see. I don't do that 
by writing a whole bunch of custom reports but instead produce the full 
(raw) reports, export, and then edit to control the level of detail (but 
I have the full report in case there are questions).

For example, a board might be interested in what we paid an intern (what 
the cost to us was) but NOT how that cost was divided between hourly 
compensation and travel reimbursement. Nor are they interested in the 
zero lines for all the interns who MIGHT have worked for us during the 
reporting period but didn't << but can't afford to suppress ALL zero 
amount accounts as in some cases seeing the account with zero of 
interest >>  I can do all that suppression of lines of no interest to 
the board during the edit process when creating the finished product 
handed out at a board meeting. Going to have to edit anyway to add 
annotations*.

In other words, you could produce the report, export it, then edit out 
the detail lines you don't want to see. I do not consider exporting an 
extra step. After all, going to want all the reports for prior periods 
available so best kept in a directory like "reports for 201x" rather 
than all still within gnucash.

Michael D Novack

* For example, one of those unexpected zero amounts I referred to 
earlier. That might be an expense the board would have expected to have 
been paid but wasn't. Say a print shop was late sending us the invoice 
for a large mailing. Important for the board to know "we don't have 
quite as much money as it seems because a large pending bill" so this 
would have an annotation in the report.