[GNC] Experimental Balance Sheet report

David T. sunfish62 at yahoo.com
Wed Sep 16 12:40:43 EDT 2020


Hello,

Today, I tried out the "Balance Sheet (Multicolumn)" report in the 
Experimental reports section, and I'd like to share some observations.

1. When initially run, I receive an empty report. This is similar to the 
initial result of the basic Transaction report, except in the latter 
case, users are given a note that links them to the report options. It 
would seem to me that at the least, this report should do the same. A 
better solution in both cases would be to have initial parameters that 
return some kind of data--however unrelated to the user's end 
goal--rather than an empty page. It seems to me that users are better at 
changing something they see that is wrong, rather than trying to conjure 
it up out of thin air. (the famous quote from US Supreme Court Justice 
Potter Stewart regarding obscenity comes to mind here: "I know it when I 
see it. This is not it."). In the Balance Sheet, changing the Period 
Duration setting from its default "None" to anything else (I'd suggest 
"Year") yields data from which a user can build. (I have no suggestions 
for the Transaction Report.)

2. The report defaults to including all accounts, including hidden and 
placeholder accounts. While there is an option on the Accounts tab to 
display hidden accounts, I think the decision to include hidden accounts 
in the report by default is confusing, given that the Account tab 
doesn't display hidden accounts by default. I think it makes more sense 
for the report either to default to omitting hidden accounts, or to 
default to displaying hidden accounts in the options dialog. I see that 
the standard Balance Sheet report also includes hidden accounts by 
default, although this is masked because the standard report limits the 
accounts to 3 levels (the Experimental report defaults to All levels). I 
will note that there is an option on the Display tab to omit zero 
balance accounts, which may have been seen as a way to skip hidden 
accounts. However, while it may not be prudent or common practice to 
hide accounts that have balances, there is nothing in the program to 
prevent this, which means that hiding zero balance accounts is not the 
same as including hidden accounts. I'll note that if I Clear All and 
then click Select All on the Accounts tab, the report properly omits all 
hidden accounts, which it should also do by default. I suggest that both 
reports should default to omitting Hidden accounts on opening, and that 
the default level setting should be the same for both.

3. The report propagates balances all the way up the account hierarchy, 
which makes sense for accounts denominated in a currency. However, with 
accounts denominated in commodities (such as Stock or Mutual Fund 
accounts), it makes less sense, and in fact renders the report extremely 
difficult to follow, especially with accounts with many different 
commodities. Seeing a full listing of all 150 different commodities (and 
various subsets thereof) repeated for

Assets,

Assets:Investments,

Assets:Investments:Taxed,

Assets:Investments:Taxed:Self, and

Assets:Investments:Taxable:Self:Brokerage A

gets old and confusing very quickly. It would be better to propagate 
totals for the book currency  only, and leave the tallying of stock and 
mutual fund holdings to the Advanced Portfolio report. I will note that 
initially, I was going to ask why some entries in the report were listed 
as hyperlinks, while others were not. After some puzzling, I figured out 
that the non-linked entries were summarizations of holdings further down 
the hierarchy. Removing the numerous duplications of commodity 
summmarizations would at least make it a little clearer what is going on 
in this regard. I will further note that the standard report does not 
repeat this information up the hierarchy.

Best,

David T.




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