Account report error for transactions the last 30 days

[Maf. King]

On Thursday, 12 October 2017 20:00:41 BST Tom B wrote:

> When performing a search to see how much I've spent with a particular vendor
> (i.e. gas station, grocer) the search results register opens showing all
> entries with the specific vendor and of course zero balance(s) in the
> search register. Now if I select "reports > account report" I would expect
> the report to show zero balances with totals for credits and debits.  This
> is not the case as I see a non-zero balance column in the report although
> the search results register shows zero balance.
> 
> To further muddy the waters I have discovered this unexpected balance
> uniformly increasing up until around entries from mid-august and then the
> balance in the "search results account report" to steadily decrease? For
> gasoline or groceries i would expect the balance to uniformly increase with
> each entry. The report shows debits and credits in the correct columns and
> none with negative values.
> So my question(s) are 1. why would there be a account report balance other
> than zero when the search results registers shows zero and 2. why would the
> balance seemingly reverse arithmetically for only the past six weeks or so?
> 
> All accounts are in balance (no imbalances shown for any account type) and
> account register reports all provide expected results.  It is only search
> results register acting strange.  By the way, this only occurs for entries
> dated after mid-august.
> 
> Also, the OS is LinuxMint 18.2 with GnuCash ver 2.6.12.  Any help would be
> most appreciated.
> 
> Tom
>
 Hi Tom.

I see exactly the same behaviour - Edit -> Find on the tree view, set 
Description to some vendor name (not a Business->Vendor object, just a given 
description, say Tesco).  Then on the resulting search results tab go Reports 
-> Account Report.  My Balance column swaps its "direction of change" several 
times, seemingly at random, so I don't think there is anything special about 
this August in your data.

Filtering down to just 4 recent transactions with my vendor, I see that the 
Sums of the Debits &  Credits columns do not sum to match the totals at the 
bottom of the report, so it is probably completely useless to run it!

my best guess is that the Search Results register view is not a proper account 
(despite the way it looks) and so, what you are seeing from the report is 
effectively Garbage In -> Garbage out.

Of course, I may be way off the mark here with my guess - hopefully if I am 
then a developer (or someone who knows the reports code well) will jump in...

and I can't think of another way to be able to find out how much has been spent 
with a single "Description" - although the transaction report does get close 
it won't subtotal by description.   Maybe the new reports from Doug Doughty 
(search the list aver about the last 6 months) will help you.

HTH,
Maf