[GNC] Sharing reports

[Tommy Trussell]

On Mon, Sep 8, 2025 at 3:49 PM Tiago Dias <tiagodematosdias at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I made a bunch of reports to give us an overview of our
> spending.
>
> My understanding is that these reports are stored within my PCs home
> directory, which makes it impossible to share the reports across PCs.
>
> I could just put a copy in the one drive, and have her copy it over to her
> machine, but that makes it inconvenient to update everywhere if I make new
> reports or change existing ones.
>
> Is there any way to adjust where the reports are saved to/read from?
>
> Ideally I would just point it at a OneDrive folder and we would both be
> reading the same report files.
>

I am running GnuCash 5.12 (Flatpak) on Ubuntu 24.04. I presume, since you
mentioned OneDrive, that you might be using some flavor of Windows.

Can you make a symlink? I think Windows supports it, but it might not be as
straightforward as on Linux.

I have not done it (though I have considered it for similar reasons!) but I
would first try creating a symlink (from either the file or the directory
the saved reports file get stored in), and point the target to the shared
OneDrive folder. Do the same for the other PC. That way, as far as GnuCash
is concerned, the shared file or folder hasn't changed, but it gets
transferred to the shared folder.

Here is one VERY IMPORTANT thing I would watch out for -- you should be
very careful about saving OR EVEN OPENING GnuCash nearly the same time on
two different machines with shared files. Adding the shared saved reports
file(s) increases the chance you might clobber the data. I vaguely recall
some OneDrive users complaining there may be a significant "lag" between
saving the file on one PC and the changes propagating through OneDrive to
the other PC.

I can't advise on the details, but when I use DropBox or Insync, I can
trigger a resync using the "stop sync" command followed by the "start sync"
command after saving my files on each machine. If OneDrive has a similar
command, you might try it and have a look at your shared folder on each.
You might also have a special command in OneDrive to indicate it should
locally synchronize those files on your network.


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