- Reports

Mike or Penny Novack mpnovack at mtdata.com
Sun Nov 13 10:16:53 EST 2016


On 11/13/2016 2:57 AM, Owen Carlton wrote:
> Hello,
>
>   A question about Reports.
>
>   Is it possible to Customize Reports for Balance Sheet and Profit & Loss, to
> show two columns ( Current Month and Months to Date )
>   
>
> Regards
>
> Owen Carlton
Confusing question. WHAT do you mean by "months to date" for a Balance 
Sheet report. A Balance Sheet is for a specific date, not a time 
interval << you might have meant "Balance Sheet at the end of this 
month" vs "Balance Sheet at the end of last month" >>

But I will now tell you what I was advised by an experienced accountant 
when I asked if I should write customized reports to do this. Because in 
my case, an experienced professional and could get by in LISP (scheme is 
a LISP dialect). He said, don't bother Mike. Just produce the four 
reports (needed to prepare the formal annual report) and export them. 
Balance Sheets for the end of last period and this period and Revenue 
Statements (what a non-profit calls P&L) for last period and this one. 
Then we bring these into a document which we can edit using our favorite 
general purpose editor. He said that any experienced accountant would do 
it that way because the final report is going to have both fixed text << 
stating things like the principles used >> plus annotations for all the 
items that will appear unusual. If going to have to edit it anyway, 
might as well do all of it using a powerful, general purpose editor.

Michael D Novack

PS: This also allows cleaning up the reports, not showing those zero 
balances that are not relevant for THIS report but you would want those 
accounts to stay in the books.


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