[GNC] Some questions about reports

[Chris Green]

On Wed, Apr 06, 2022 at 09:24:20AM -0400, Michael or Penny Novack wrote:
> On 4/6/2022 8:15 AM, Chris Green wrote:
> 
> > I use GnuCash for our (very small) church's accounts and find it works
> > very well.
> > 
> > However I do have issues with the reports, especially at year end for
> > auditing.
> > 
> > The auditor wants a report which looks pretty much like the profit and
> > loss report but with the underlying bank account balances at the bottom.
> > Is there any simple way to get this?  ... or if getting it all on one
> > report isn't easy (I'm not going to learn Scheme just to do this!)
> > then is there a report which will provide the basic bank account
> > balances, e.g.:-
> > 
> >      Bank account at start of year               xxxx.xx
> >      Less excess of expenses over income         yyyy.yy
> > 
> >      Bank account at 31st December YYYY          zzzz.zz
> 
> Yes, I have seen this format presented (and the person who took over as
> Treasurer with one of my organizations does this -- also showing quarters
> side by side)
> 
> This is combining some balance sheet items along with the revenue statement.
> Thus when I was presenting to the board a revenue statement for some period
> I would ALSO be handing out the balance sheet reports for start of period
> and ed of period. If I were asked to produce the report (the results) in the
> format requested by your accountant I would run those balance sheet and the
> income statement for the dates involved. I would then EXPORT those raw
> reports.
> 
> I would then open a "document" under the control of my favorite editor with
> a suitable name (to distinguish it from the previous and next). I would copy
> into this the statement of revenues. I would copy below that the bank
> account parts of the balance sheets and between them copy the line that was
> net gain or loss. I would also (because under the control of a full service
> editor) do things like add annotation for any unusual items. Take a look at
> your line "Less excess of expenses over income yyyy.yy" --- you'd want this
> to read differently if that period you had an "excess of income over
> expenses".
> 
OK, yes, it was what I was thinking of doing - that is simply
concatenating the two reports (in HTML) with appropriate editing to
turn them into a single HTML document.  I can do this OK (though I
don't really like editing raw HTML).

My only question then is what report do I need for the bank balance
start/end figures?


> And I would do it this way even though a retired professional fluent in a
> half dozen or so computer languages, and though never paid to write in LISP,
> I can read it reasonably well and so would only take me a week or so to get
> up to speed in SCHEME (a LISP dialect). I would NOT want to have "being
> treasurer" of an organization dependent on being able to program in some
> computer language.
> 
Me too, though no LISP or similar.  I'm an assembler (on various
micros and minis), C, C++ and Java software engineer.  Plus I have
learnt and like Python.


> > Also, is it possible to show -ve amounts in 'accountant' format? I.e.
> > as a value in brackets  £(1234.56).
> Maybe that's an option within gnucash among your choices for how to display
> negatives. Please note that there isn't ONE "accountant standard". For
> example, I would be expected to show consecutive periods side by side (this
> quarter vs previous quarter, this year vs previous year, etc.

Of course there are as many 'standards' as accountants! :-)

However the only option I can find in GnuCash is "negative values in
red", nothing like (1234.56) which works much better in monochrome
(which I suspect is one of the reasons for using it).


> > 
> > Finally, is there a way to get all reports to show all items in the
> > particular accounts?  It always takes me ages to find the settings for
> > the accounting period and, as I keep each year separately, all I ever
> > want to do is show everything that's in the particular set of
> > accounts.  (I can think of nothing worse than having to change the
> > reporting dates every time I want to look at last year's accounts
> > instead of this years)
> > 
> Remember, I described exporting before editing. If you SAVED all those
> exports suitably named (and your edited version that you showed to your
> board, gave to the accountant, etc.) you still have them. Just look for them
> in the directory (file folder) where you put them. If the name includes the
> date will be easy to find the right one, No need to rerun them in gnucash 
> or keep them as open tabs!
> 
I'll end up with *loads* of saved reports though.  It would be so much
easier if a report simply showed everything in the accounts (by
default anyway).

-- 
Chris Green