[GNC] new tool for Interactive Gnucash reports in Dash

Joel Aufrecht joel at aufrecht.org
Tue Sep 1 16:52:30 EDT 2020


Hello,

Announcing Ledger Explorer, which provides Gnucash Cash Flow and Balance
Sheet interactive graphs with drilldown to individual transactions. (
Screenshots
<https://github.com/saufrecht/ledger-explorer/tree/master/screenshots>).
It's built on Dash, reads Gnucash CSV transaction exports, is GPL, and
is available
for alpha-testing <https://github.com/saufrecht/ledger-explorer>. It
includes a Gnucash sample data set (CSV
<https://github.com/saufrecht/ledger-explorer/blob/master/sample_data.csv>,
XML
<https://github.com/saufrecht/ledger-explorer/blob/master/sample_data.xml>)
which some may find useful for other purposes.


Details
As a long-time Gnucash user for household accounting, I have struggled to
get useful planning information back out.  Some of this is because of
Gnucash's reporting limitations, but just as much is because of garbage
in→garbage out problems.  An anomalous value in a report may be meaningful,
or it may be caused by miscategorized transactions.  Navigating through the
account ledgers, searching, and filtering all require multiple steps (menu
clicks, menu selections, dialog boxes, etc) for almost any action.

I built a new report using Dash because it's a F/OSS interactive data
visualization tool that is cross-platform (browser-based) and requires only
Python (and CSS and HTMLish).  The graphical elements include a bar chart
time series for transactions by month, quarter, or year, so it's easy to
select one month or a few months of data.  This opens a sunburst control
showing the total $s, and clicking part of the sunburst drills into
sub-accounts, with no depth limit.  It also loads all selected transactions
for the accounts and sub-accounts and selected date range into a table.
The table has instantaneous sorting, filtering, and pagination in one place
with no menu commands or separate dialogs needed.  Hence the name: Ledger
Explorer.

Questions, suggestions, complaints, and code all welcome,

Joel


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