[GNC] Advance portfolio report between two dates

[Michael or Penny Novack]

On 9/3/2023 2:43 PM, Paras Desai wrote:
> Hi Ken
>
> Thanks for your kind reply and efforts in explaining a way.
>
> Apparently, it appears that there is no alternative but to run reports on two dates and compare or do some analysis.
>
> Any reports comparing two period is a desirable thing in finance and accounting, may it be personal accounting.
>
> Thanks
>
> Paras

You are quite correct, comparing two periods is desirable.

What perhaps is confusing you is "a report" vs "comparing two runs of 
that report". Yes of course, there COULD be a report Y that compared two 
X reports. But there are some good reasons where that might best be done 
"outside". There might quite possibly be the need for some human 
decision making. I'll give a different report as an example (but one 
where "as of date A" is commonly compared to "as of date B")

Consider the Balance Sheet report. We are suggesting that to produce a 
report comparing "as of date A" with "as of date B" you rut the two 
reports, export, bring into a spreadsheet or something else you can 
edit, and there produce the final report. Why? Why not an automatically 
generated report? Well IF there is a one to one correspondence of 
accounts "as of date A" vs "as of date B" this would be simple << you 
can imagine a new report in gnucash called "Compare Balance Sheets" to 
which you would supply two dates >> But what if the CoA "as of date A" 
does NOT correspond 1:1 to the CoA "as of date B"? Accounts could have 
been added, accounts could have been deleted, accounts could have 
changed names, etc. You expect a computer (even with a pretty good AI 
application) to be able to figure out what has happened and to line 
things up properly?

Situation 1:    Account A present at date 1, absent at date 2, while 
account B present at date 2 not present at date 2.

Situation 2:   No actual change except account A was renamed account B

As a human bookkeeper, you know which happened (hopefully you remember)

Michael D Novack