A PDF report Generator, Fund Accounting

[Dennis Powless]

I was a treasurer for our fire association and creating reports that others
understood was a bit tough.  I was able to use customized reports from
gnucash, but took lots of trial and error to get what I needed.   I spent
many an hour trying to get it right.

Dennis
On Sep 4, 2015 8:47 AM, "Steve Alex" <salex at mac.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>
>
>
>
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