Average Balance Report

Wm wm_o_o_o at yahoo.co.uk
Tue Oct 18 14:28:10 EDT 2016


On 18/10/2016 13:32, David T. via gnucash-user wrote:
>> On Oct 18, 2016, at 5:17 PM, David T. via gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org> wrote:

>> I thought I’d dig into describing a few reports on the Using Gnucash wiki page, and started working on the “Average Balance” report. However, I ran into some difficulty. Could someone explain this report to me? I am curious, because it doesn’t really look like it shows averages of balances; rather, it appears to me to show the monthly value of Equity, as represented by the combination of Assets and Liabilities. If I am right, then is this report appropriately named? Would it be more correct to call it “Monthly Equity” or something similar? If I am misunderstanding, then I appreciate being set straight.
>>

> IN reply to myself, I now see that the “Average” is the Average over that given month. I discovered this when I added the Table at the bottom. 
> 
> I would still like some clarification about this; what is the primary purpose of the report? Is this report more useful than, say, taking the balance on the first day of each month? 
> 
> Furthermore, with the table loaded, I see figures that don’t make sense to me—specifically, the difference between monthly average figures and profit don’t match. This is understandable, given that the profit is a tallying of Gain and Loss for the month. However, it does look odd to show differences in Average and include an absolute Profit figure that differs from the balance changes.
> 

I think of this as one of those reports that was there at the start and
no-one has ever used or looked at since.

The Scheme

\share\gnucash\scm\gnucash\report\standard-reports\average-balance.scm

is quite well documented and says
===
;; average-balance.scm
;; Report history of account balance and other info
==
;; analyze-splits crunches a split list into a set of period
;; summaries.  Each summary is a list of (start-date end-date
;; avg-bal max-bal min-bal total-in total-out net) if multiple
;; accounts are selected the balance is the sum for all.  Each
;; balance in a foreign currency will be converted to a double in
;; the report-currency by means of the monetary->double
;; function.
===
    ;; calculate the statistics for one interval - returns a list
    ;;  containing the following:
    ;; min-max acculumator
    ;; average-accumulator
    ;; gain-loss accumulator
    ;; final balance for this interval
    ;; splits remaining to be processed.
===

i.e. it does what it does rather than being a _thing_ like a Balance Sheet.

My favourite curiosities are the Inc & Exp vs Day of Week, that would
never get added today if anyone thought about it.

-- 
Wm







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