[GNC] Understanding Transaction Report options

[George Riner]

(Using GnuCash 3.7.1 on Windows 10)

I approach the Transaction Report options for "Accounts" and "Filter 
By..." as a sort of 2-dimensional thing.  Down the rows are the incomes 
and expenses that I want reported (sorta like Quicken's old 
'categories') and across the columns are the accounts that I used to pay 
for those expenses (credit cards, checking accounts, cash, etc.)

What I find unfortunate in this regard is that both "Accounts..." and 
"Filter By..." lists are unaffected by account type.  All my accounts 
are listed in alphabetical order by my Account Name and this has the 
effect of jumbling up expense accounts and income accounts with banking 
and credit card accounts, making it necessary to have to scroll through 
each list and pick out the particular accounts for each 'dimension' I 
use.  Since I sometimes decide to create a new income or expense account 
to track some activity I'm doing, or I get a new credit card - when I 
run a saved report later - I have to remember to scroll through both 
"Accounts..." and "Filter By..." to add the new accounts to each lists' 
selections before running the report.

Because of this, I've been tempted to reorganize my COA so that I only 
have a handful of 'top' accounts and everything else is subaccounts. 
E.g. I'd have a top level of 'Expenses', a top level of 'Incomes', a top 
level of 'Bank accounts' and 'Credit cards', etc.  I could also then 
create a top level account for 'Archived' and move accounts I no longer 
use under that top level.   Then I simply select "Expenses" and 
"Incomes" in the "Accounts" list and then click 'Select Children' and in 
the 'Filter By...' list I select 'Credit Cards' and 'Bank Accounts' and 
click 'Select Children' and I'm done.

:George


On 10/13/2019 6:13 AM, Christopher Lam wrote:
>> Christopher, thank you. Let me ensure I understand.
>> and 2. When Account tab filter is set to "Include," and
>> Asset:Bank:Current, Filter-Type: Include to/from, Filter-By:
>> Expenses:School:Fees --> will show only school
>> fees.
>>
> Comment: "Include" appears to me to work similarly to the exclusionary
>> Boolean "AND" operator, since the system will only report the intersection
>> of the two sets. "Exclude," then, should show everything except the school
>> fees, and appears to operate as a Boolean "NOT" operator.
>>
> 3. Filter tab: Account Name Filter: Comment: This is another way to
>> accomplish what might have selected on the Account tab and is not a
>> completely separate function.
>>
> Correct. Case example. My book as numerous household expense accounts, e.g.
> Expenses:House:Electricity, etc.
>
> My accountant lets me deduct a proportion of house electricity bills for
> home office, and when I submit my annual statements, I find it error-prone
> to carefully select from the Accounts tab. Hence I modified the transaction
> report in 2017 to offer the ability to tag the desired accounts with "^"
> e.g. Income:Job^, Income:Bank-Interest^, Expenses:House:Electricity^ which
> means an account fullname filter for '^' gets me everything I need for my
> annual tax. The accountant then gets the responsibility of calculating the
> proportion of home office use.
>
>> With this new understanding as a baseline I'll practice a few reports. I
> do recall, however, that prior to selecting filter accounts on the Accounts
> tab, I used the Transaction Filter and needed the Filter By "Exclude" in
> order to achieve anything useful. I expect I should have chosen "None" if I
> were not going to select a Filter account
>
> Correct. the Filter-By and Filter-Type were old-style account-only
> filtering options and it would be confusing to users to find the option
> names modified or removed. See amendments to transaction.scm in
> https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/commit/5eb7ddb4e9 originally from 2001.
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