[GNC] The meaning of Running Balance in Transaction Report: bug or enhancement request?

[Vincent Dawans]

I ended up spending the week-end learning a bit of scheme and submitted a
patch via the bug report https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=765920

I assume developers will see it that way. With my patch, it retains the
existing option (where the running balance is retrieved from the account
along with the starting balance), but also added another option in which
the running balance is calculated based on the sort order in the report.
This way we can have the best of both worlds depending on needs.

On Wed, Oct 26, 2022 at 5:57 PM Adrien Monteleone <
adrien.monteleone at lusfiber.net> wrote:

> Yes, I think a clarification would be useful in the interim til the
> option is fixed.
>
> Regards,
> Adrien
>
> On 10/26/22 7:53 PM, Vincent Dawans wrote:
> > Yes it is indeed a simplified example I was using. And your second
> example
> > is the one that indeed I show as working (the one with all
> > expense accounts; in my example I just have 2 -- dining and clothes).
> That
> > as long as all transactions are included in the time period. But as soon
> as
> > you use one of the other filtering options then it also breaks even in
> that
> > single-account context since the running balance info attached to each
> > transaction doesn't actually change (the filtering just hides some
> > transactions).
> >
> > Note that if you do it the other way, meaning selecting the checking
> > account and then sorting by "other accounts" then it also doesn't work
> > since the running balance is now the one retrieved from the checking
> > account, but in a completely different order than what is now sorted.
> >
> > The bottom line is that the "running balance" means "running balance
> > attached to each transaction in the underlying accounts selected in the
> > report" and it only makes sense if the report is sorted by primary
> > accounts. That's it. I think I am going to create a bug report so that at
> > least there can be some explanation or something added to the option to
> > mention that. As it stands I think it's really counter-intuitive
> > considering that the transaction report has so many filtering options and
> > other ways to sort, all of which render the running balance quite
> > nonsensical.
>
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