Difficulty reporting split transactions filtered by description?

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 1/29/2016 6:21 PM, Greg Skelhorn wrote:
> On 16/01/29 12:27, "R. Victor Klassen" <rvklassen at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Here is what I wound up doing to solve the same problem:
>>
>> All of my payroll entries have splits like:
>> ...
>>
>> Time to make T4s, I created a transaction report, restricted to dates within 2015, and including all the accounts listed above.
>> At that point I’ve got as much help from GNUCash as I can (without learning Scheme). So I copy the report into a spreadsheet,
>> save as CSV, go into an editor to remove the C$ at the front of every number, save back to CSV, and pull into OpenOffice (Excel would work too).
>>
>>
>> Makes sense Victor. No reason to expect gnucash to do it all. Thanks!
>>
>> Greg
Back when I first began using gnucash for organizational books I asked a 
more experienced accountant should I write customized reports. Unlike 
most of you, I wrote software for a living, and could at least read 
LISP, and when you already are fluent in half a dozen languages, no big 
deal to add another (SCHEME is a LISP dialect). He said "Don't bother 
Mike. Just export the data and we'll use a favorite editor to put it all 
into final pretty form, with all the necessary added annotations and 
text. That is how any accountant would choose to do it."

To give you an example from the full year report I will be presenting to 
the Board on Sunday. Because a reimbursement check from a grant arriving 
near the end of the year was made out incorrectly and had to be sent 
back for voiding and reissue, income that should have arrived in 2015 
did not in fact arrive until a few days into 2016 (and the organization 
keeps its books on the "cash" basis). Now that required a whole bunch of 
annotations and explanatory text because the amount more than a quarter 
of yearly income! You can imagine the distortion cased to the "gain or 
loss for the year" and the balance sheet. Since at this meeting the 
board would be making plans budgetary decisions for the rest of 2016, 
obviously the report they are given, besides the actual figures for 
2015, needed to provide in the annotations the approximate "real" amounts.

Really too much to expect gnucash itself to provide that much general 
purpose editor capability. Especially when general purpose editors 
already exist. When you look at the problem (report directly out of 
gnucash needs editing) it isn't the usual small amount of editing needed 
that should determine whether that little bit should be a facility of 
the software but what are the potential worst case scenarios. If 
sometimes you will need the full power of a general purpose editor, 
might as well always use it and just ask for the DATA out of gnucash, 
not the final formatting.

Michael D Novack

Michael D Novack