[GNC] (Multicolumn) Reports no longer sort accounts by account code after date change

[Paul Bente]

Specifically, Income Statement (Multicolumn) and Balance Sheet (Multicolumn) Reports

I’m currently using GnuCash 5.5 on Mac OS Sonoma 14.2.1. As I have done for years now, I’m preparing year-end reports using Income Statement (Multicolumn) and Balance Sheet (Multicolumn) from the Reports menu. I have assigned Account Codes to Placeholder accounts so they sort in an informative order instead of alphabetically by account name. I’m seeing new, strange behavior this year. When I open the Income Statement (Multicolumn) report it defaults to the current period 2024 (income and expenses from 1/1/2024 to current date) and the Placeholder accounts sort by Account Codes as expected. When I use “Options” to edit the start and end of period to 1/1/2023 and 12/31/2023 and “Apply”, the sort order of Placeholders changes to alphabetical. A similar thing happens with the Balance Sheet (Multicolumn) report.

This is new behavior. I have been using these reports for years including when they were under the Experimental heading. I was using Gnucash 4 last January (probably 4.13 as I usually keep up to date) without this problem. Curiously, when I open a saved report configuration from last year, the Placeholders sort by Account Code but if I edit the dates using Options, that report also changes to alphabetical sorting.
Additional experimenting shows that any change to report dates triggers this behavior. This behavior does not occur with the non-Multicolumn Income Statement or Balance Sheet in my limited testing.

Has anyone else seen this or is there a configuration parameter somewhere that I am missing? I suspect this may be a bug in Gnucash 5.

Best Regards,
Paul