A PDF report Generator, Fund Accounting

[Steve Alex]

I started using GnuCash a couple years ago when I became the Quartermaster (aka accounting clerk!) at a VFW Post. The VFW uses a form of Fund Based Accounting and I found GC through some search.

There is nothing magical about fund based accounting, at least in the VFW application. Basically your checkbook account just has sub accounts that define “Funds”. Some funds are “restricted”, for instance, money put into a “Relief” fund should only be used to help Veterans in Need. With some help from posts in the mailing list I set up my accounts and all is fine. It is up to me to be the “restricter”, GC can’t do that, and the piece of paper (GL Book) couldn’t do it before I took over the task.

My only problem was that the build-in reports didn’t look like the VFW reporting requirements/examples.  All the information was in the reports, but trying to explain that to an “inspector/auditor” was futile. I originally solved that problem by exporting GC transaction to CVS, importing them into a Ruby on Rails application and generating the reports I needed to make them happy - basically:


Date	Desc				   Checking		  General		  Relief		  Fund..
							db		cr		db		cr	db		cr	db		cr

5/22		AL Power Elec				    503.22                    503.22


You get the picture


I’ve done this for a few years. A little bit of a pain in exporting and importing, but nothing I couldn’t handle. I then though I could share my work with other VFW posts and decided that some couldn’t handle all there RoR stuff, especially on a Windows box. I then started to refactor my process. Rather than export transactions I did a “Save as” to sqlite3 as my export file. I then generated data from basically the Accounts, Transactions and Splits tables in GnuCash. (I found an example somewhere, but can’t remember where) and used Prawn, a Ruby PDF generator to create the reports.  This was still all in RoR, but I then pulled out the database and pdf code and put it into a Ruby Command Line applications.

Then from a command line (including Windows after installing Ruby) I could do:

	vfwcash ledger 2015-08

and generate my ledger, or checkbook register, or split ledger or, whatever I needed.

While my approach is somewhat customized to a VFW, taking data out of GnuCash and creating a report is not, it’s just code you have to write.

I’ve posted my approach on github at  https://github.com/salex/vfwcash <https://github.com/salex/vfwcash> 

If you write code (it is in Ruby, but it’s just code) and are looking for an approach to writing custom reports, you make be able to build onto my approach.

I’ve be writing code since the  Apple II days, but consider myself just a hacker, more of a hobby to me, so don’t expect perfection, just that it works.