[GNC] Custom Report

[Michael or Penny Novack]

On 5/9/2019 8:28 PM, Adrien Monteleone wrote:
> Excel might be a problem, but LibreOffice has no issues either opening saved GnuCash reports, or importing them as plain text. (copy/paste also works) The only issue with doing comparative P&L’s in a spreadsheet is that each period needs to have all accounts visible so things line up easily, otherwise you’ll have lots of formatting to do.
In general, you DO have this "line up" problem since there is no good 
reason to expect the CoA to be EXACTLY the same in different time 
periods. This is not different whether doing inside or outside of 
gnucash. There is not going to be an automatic solution, each situation 
(of the accounts being slightly different) may call for a different 
solution and probably an annotation as to what was done.

As for how hard to get the exported data into a document under control 
of an editor, I can't speak about when EXCEL is used since I don't use 
it. Whether or not a particular editor app is suitable is outside the 
scope of what I am willing to talk about. I do this all the time, 
opening the (exported) HTML with the browser I choose to use (FireFox) 
and then copy the data "unformatted text" into a document under the 
control of LibreOffice.

Do this every quarter for just one period (year through this quarter) 
except for end of year when after doing this, put in parallel the one 
form the previous year for the annual financial report. More or less 
"standard" for a non-profits.

Michael D Novack