Budget Reporting Issues

[Wm...]

Sun, 27 Sep 2015 18:09:43 
<1B5C81C9-52F4-4994-9BFE-C1CEF16B301F at yahoo.com>
David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote...

>Wm,

>Thank you for your reply.

>As for specific points you make:

>1) I am not sure the earlier exercise to which you refer. I do know 
>that there is a longstanding bug requesting report documentation, and 
>also that this bug has languished. Can you give me a better reference 
>from which to work specifically on documenting the Budget Reports?


https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=708267
Bug 708267 - Budget documentation is out of date
Robert Ratliff did most of the work c. Sep-Oct 2013
I helped a bit and Geert pressed the button at the end.

2) My intention is to improve the documentation for the reports, 
although whether this will end up in the Help file or the Guide is not 
certain at this point. My predilection is to put it in the Guide.

I certainly think the Guide is the document requiring more work in this 
area.


3) You state that the only report that is useful or necessary is the 
Budget Report; if that is true, perhaps we can shortcircuit the entire 
exercise by removing these other reports if they are truly not useful or 
used.

That isn't what I said (or at least wasn't what I meant).  A Budget and 
the Budget Report are the keys to understanding how gnc's budgets work.

*** Can anyone else weigh in on these reports? Are they actually useful? 
Is anyone using them? If no one is using them, and they are not useful, 
perhaps they could be removed from the package, thus eliminating the 
entire documentation issue altogether.

I wouldn't do that.  The main problem (I think) is that people don't 
understand the Budgets so the reports never make sense.

4) Since you feel that understanding budgets will explain to me how the 
budget reports are intended to work, please tell me what I should 
understand about budgets in order to understand the reports. I freely 
admit that my undersanding of the budget features is superficial, but I 
do understand that they can establish predicted amounts for a 
user-selected set of accounts over a user-selected set of time periods. 
I also understand that the Budget Report allows me to view budget and 
actual data on an entire set of books for a given budget. Please tell me 
how to move from this point to a point where the *other* reports make 
sense. What specifically will help me understand these other reports?

OK, maybe you already know this but in gnc any of the Budget Reports are 
reports on a Budget.  If the Budget (a thing that once created exists in 
your book with its own account structure) isn't right the reports are 
going to appear wonky.  A gnc Budget is a static thing, it can be 
changed as often as you like but it doesn't adjust automatically to 
anything, it doesn't care about time, the fact that income changed, 
nothing, unless you tell it.

People coming from other environments aren't always used to this, 
particularly those using gnc for personal finance that might expect to 
adjust next month because the fridge packed up last week.

gnc has a more formal Budgeting structure that I don't use for my 
personal accounts but do use and find invaluable in non-profit orgs 
where trustees set income and expense budgets and performance needs to 
be measured against them.

So, to some extent, I think fuller documentation in the Guide will 
involve the current Budgeting system's intended audience, possibly even 
just warning people about what not to expect ... but maybe you already 
understand that and it really is just the reports you are curious about.

The basic problem, really, is that personal budgeting is very different 
to other kinds of budgeting and although gnc is excellent for personal 
finance the extant budgeting isn't geared for that.

Roll on SQL as standard so the dev's can get on with functionality and 
reporting is a user issue.


[snip 5 covered elsewhere in thread]

6) Regarding saving custom reports, my point in this is to document the 
existing reports included with GnuCash; I am not interested in how to 
save a custom report. But thank you anyway.


The problem with that is human's don't like having to do the same things 
they did yesterday and the day before again today because they *didn't* 
save the report once it was working and someone forgot to tell them.  An 
example: most people / organisations do not budget for balance sheet 
accounts, but the default reports include them.  Q: do you want to go 
through the exercise of excluding them each time you run the report?

-- 
Wm...