Budget Reporting Issues and some small philosophy

David T. sunfish62 at yahoo.com
Tue Oct 13 19:38:07 EDT 2015


Wm,

There’s a long-standing bug (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=633590 <https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=633590>) regarding report documentation, which resurfaced on the -devel list in the course of a discussion on import documentation (thread begins at http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2015-August/038934.html <http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2015-August/038934.html>). For the record, there was a good bit of discussion there by Geert and John about what the Guide and Help manual might each contain, and how they might be coordinated going forward. Your suggestions regarding the bigger picture might fit in with that discussion.

In addition, there is seemingly regular parade of users asking basic questions about both the use and intent of GnuCash’s reports. 

All of this led to my resuming the process of documenting the reports included with GnuCash. The last action on 655390 back several years was an understanding that initial reports documentation would be placed in the Wiki until it was complete enough to be placed in the Guide. Taking a look at the wiki  (http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Using_GnuCash#Reports_Included_in_GnuCash <http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Using_GnuCash#Reports_Included_in_GnuCash>) shows that there has been some work done in a number of Reports categories, but none in the Budget reports. I figured that would be a reasonable place to resume documentation, and began to test these reports out to determine their purpose and functionality—solely to improve the documentation of these reports. When I encountered troubles using the reports, I put out a general request for information to the user-list, in hopes of getting some explanation on these reports’ intended use and function.

You’ve twice now asked me to ask specific questions about these reports. OK, here goes.

Can you explain to me the underlying intent of the Budget Balance Sheet? What information does it report? What information is it supposed to report? I can’t figure out; the numbers returned don’t seem to match either one’s budgeted amounts, nor the actual amounts returned by a Balance Sheet.

Further, in theory, what information, precisely, would a “Budget Balance Sheet” even provide? Since a Balance Sheet is, by definition, a statement of balances on a given date, what is the correllating information in a budget? Moreover, if the Budget Balance Sheet is supposed to provide some figure as of a given date, why then doesn’t the report include an option to select that effective date (as the Budget Report does)?

David

> On Oct 12, 2015, at 6:21 PM, Wm... <tcnw81 at tarrcity.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> Sat, 10 Oct 2015 21:37:30 <DD6C951D-7032-4287-A4B5-3569118299D6 at yahoo.com>
> David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote...
> 
>> Your initial reply successfully convinced me that, since I am not using the budget reports myself, I should defer the documentation to someone who does. Feel free to write up documentation regarding the budget features, and how the specific reports are intended to be used. I have neither the time nor the mental bandwidth to manage it.
> 
> Where do you (or anyone else) think the main bit of documentation work needs to be done?  Is it the Budgets themselves or the reports?  i.e. where do you get stuck?
> 
> If someone says "I don't understand this bit" I'm happy to help but I'm not a natural detailed-abstract-documenter and in the case of gnc Budgets (and gnc reports in general) I'm not sure describing Report Options is what is needed (or indeed generally useful in abstraction).
> 
> Time passes
> 
> I've been through
> 
> ===
> Tutorial & Concepts
>  Managing Business Finances
>    Budgets
> ===
> 
> and
> 
> ===
> Help Manual
>  Windows & Menu Options Overview
>    Budget Window
> ===
> 
> and I'm not seeing a lot wrong in the detail
> 
> *BUT*
> 
> it is just that these bits aren't joined up.
> 
> ==========
> 
> I think the main issue is the joining up.  I don't know about other flox but when I want *gnc* help I generally head for Tutorial & Concepts before the Help Manual because that is where I have generally found what I need.
> 
> Perhaps the problem is that the Budget documentation is split between
> ===
> Tutorial & Concepts
> *and*
> Help Manual
> ===
> 
> Proposal: merge all the Budget documentation
> i.e. everything referring to Actions / Budget & Reports / Budget
> under Tutorial & Concepts and make bare bones references in the Help Manual to the Tutorial & Concepts.
> 
> Motivation: gnc Budgets, such as they are, should be dealt with as a whole, we don't expect the reader to find out about Investments and related concepts and tools in more than one place, why should Budgets be different?
> 
> Needed: thoughts from seniors and anyone else that cares about effectively deleting a chunk from the Help Manual and moving it all to Tutorials & Concepts.
> 
> Possible side benefit: by ripping the existing Budget documentation out from everywhere and placing them firmly under
> ===
> Tutorial & Concepts
>  Managing Business Finances
> ===
> a space is left for people to think about personal budgeting which is quite a different thing for most or many people these days.
> 
> Thoughts, please.
> 
> -- 
> Wm...
> 
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