Extract Income/Expense to spreadsheet, but totals don't match

[Mike or Penny Novack]

I am not clear what you are doing. See below your entry.


On 3/19/2016 11:11 PM, Roland Roberts wrote:
> I started out with the budget tool but the way it handles liability
> accounts was confusing me, so I decided to do a poor man's budget and
> just cut and past my income/expense report into a spreadsheet.
>
> I unchecked "include accounts with zero total balances" and checked
> "omit zero balance figures", changed parent account balanced "do not
> show" and parent account subtotals "show subtotals".
>
> What I expected was that I could just sum  the right most subtotal
> column for the income section and get the same number GC gives me for
> total revenue. I don't.
>
> I already checked the account selection. All my income accounts are
> under a single parent account which I selected, then selected "select
> child accounts" and chose "all" for levels of subaccounts.
>
> What am I doing wrong to end up with a difference here?
>
> roland
What report? Why are you talking about "budget"? If I were wanting a 
report showing the income and expense totals (and of course I do this 
all the time)
1) I would be choosing the report "Income Statement".
2) I would normally be using the same display options you say you want 
(to show the parent subtotals after, not before)
3) I would be doing no account selection, though I might* choose to 
ignore zero balances.

I would expect the report to then show all income and expense accounts 
and the subtotals to be right and in accordance with the grand total. 
Never had gnucash get this wrong.

Are you asking us why your totaling in the spreadsheet doesn't match the 
totaling when done within gnucash? Asking what you might or might not 
have specified incorrectly when using your spreadsheet app? If so, some 
general advice when dealing with a computer problem (or with a 
bookkeeping problem for that matter). When diagnosing, go back to the 
last point where you can verify that things are correct. In this case, 
would be the report while still within gnucash. Was that correct? (did 
the totaling look right there?). If so, the problem happened AFTER that 
point (not in gnucash but in your spreadsheet -- possibly some totaling 
operation not specified correctly). In other words, always try to 
isolate WHERE the error occurred (by finding "checkpoints" where still 
correct)

Michael D Novack, Treasurer MA Chapter of TACF (and treasurer of some 
other organizations)



* In actual use, I normally wait for the post export editing so that I 
can be selective. An organization board of directors sometimes does want 
to see that a particular account where they might have expected 
something was zero -- probably I'd be adding an annotation about it in 
the edited report as presented to the meeting.