[GNC] Configurable Year Start Day/Month

[Vincent Dawans]

My comment was related to custom report creation from an
end-user perspective, which is to say using the given set of options. So
yes the move to c++ makes changing the supporting utility code on the fly
more difficult if that's something required (as in this case). That is a
limitation of going from an interpreted to a compiled language but I don't
think in itself it's a reason not to do it if other considerations like
code maintainability are to be considered.

For that specific issue there is no question the current implementation for
the financial/fiscal year doesn't make total sense (whether written in
scheme or C++ is irrelevant). It seems that John Ralls mentions the
problems with it in the discussion from 2021 you link that and hints that
it might be changed in version 5. I don't see a change as of 5.0 yet
(unless I am missing something) so I can only assume it's still in the
works or more help is needed to implement that fix. As much as it was
possible to hack a fix in version 4 I think it is worthwhile to focus on a
more permanent fix in version 5.

John Ralls says "GnuCash uses the term Accounting Period for non-calendar
fiscal years. There are two problems with this: First, it's in Preferences
instead of File properties so a user can't have different books with
different fiscal years and two users of the same book have to set their
preferences to the same Accounting Period. Second and maybe worse it sets
specific dates that don't roll over."

Hopefully we can join our efforts to help fix this feature so that hacking
code is no longer needed.

Sincerely,

Vincent Dawans



On Mon, Apr 17, 2023 at 9:11 PM flywire <flywire0 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I can't see how.
>
> Firstly, from previous comments, people don't seem to understand my
> workflow. The suggestion it is only a matter of setting the Accounting
> Period once per year is so wrong without changing start date of year.
>
> To briefly summarise, I have half a dozen entities and a few extras, each
> with separate tax file numbers in a standard folder structure. If an entity
> has it's own bank account it gets it's own set of books, otherwise, I use
> QuickBooks and put classes on transactions/splits and report on the
> classes. (My preference is the openness of GnuCash.) I normally navigate
> through the Windows folders and double-click on the entity.gnucash file or
> start it from the MRU list so it is easy to flick between entities.
>
> A typical workflow is preparing tax returns for the previous financial
> year. The V4 year hack defining start year as 1 July works well for all the
> reports I use with year being relative to current date (as opposed to
> accounting period which must be explicitly set). I often need to look at 2
> years prior, ie the last finalised tax return, but it doesn't have a date
> option so I set start/end of accounting period to the dates for 2
> (financial) years prior. This workflow allows me to identify issues with
> transactions/splits/accounts that often need something similar in another
> entity. I imagine the workflow is fairly typical.
>
> Accounting period is really useful for running a series of reports when the
> entity was different, say a particular project period.
>
> So, I very much want to define the current year which would also define
> prior year, keep the existing accounting period functionality, and add a
> start/end of 2 years prior period. A preference setting like currency for
> start date of year would be nice but I'd be happy with a hacked version.
>
> Regards
>
> https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2023-April/106523.html
> Adrien wrote:
> > I can certainly see the utility of being able to define various 'start
> > of year' options for different reports. Though I think this is
> > essentially what the 'accounting period' option was supposed to
> > accomplish. (and then the report's generic 'start of accounting period'
> > will use that date)
> >
> > However, this preference allows only either a very general relative
> > date, or an absolute date with a year, so it has to be reset if wanting
> > to set a specific date. I think there is already a bug report for it.
> >
> > If this preference offered the ability to set *any* day relative to
> > *any* year, would that accomplish your goal?
> >
> > (I still think a hard absolute date option is useful for someone working
> > on historical data)
> >
> > Regards,
> > Adrien
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