[GNC] Gnucash Reports - Comparative Income Statement

[Michael or Penny Novack]

On 1/5/2020 1:46 PM, Bill Dika wrote:
> What would it cost for someone to create a comparative income statement report comparing this period to the corresponding period last year?
>
> I am willing to pay if it is not too much. The report could be included in Gnucash and released under the GPL v3 or later.
> If this is not the correct list to ask for this, please direct me to where I might find someone willing to prepare this.
> Thanks.
>
> Bill Dika
> _______________________________________________


It is the right place to ask, but let me first give the advice I 
received when I first took over as treasurer for a 501(c)3 << it is 
NORMAL for the "Statement of Revenue and Expenses"* of a non-profit to 
be presented that way, at least the annual one >>

At the time a recently retired very senior systems analyst, able to at 
least read LISP (scheme is a LISP dialect) I asked the lawyer/accountant 
if I should code those special reports. He said "Don't bother Mike. Just 
run the raw reports, export them, and then bring that data in under 
control of your favorite full power editor. It's what any experienced 
accountant would choose to do. That's because you will STILL have 
editing to do" << add fixed text, add notations, deal with accounts not 
entirely corresponding in the two periods, deal with "pretty printing", 
etc. >> In other words, because STILL going to be doing editing, might 
as well do that in one place, and where you have the power of a real 
editor.

Try looking at the annual statements of a non-profit or two and you will 
quickly see that this is what must have been done. That the report 
presented matches everything else (fonts, etc.) and not the direct 
output of some accounting software.

Understand?  I am the sort of person who could have done this coding, 
but following this advice chose not to.,

Michael D Novack

* The "Income Statement" report -- that's what a non-profit calls the 
"Profit and Loss" statement (in gnucash, "Income Statement". But the 
same in parallel is wanted for the Balance Statement.