To get a handle on the reporting features that we need, I've spent
some time playing with Quicken to see what the competition offers :)
After wading through the interface (does anyone know how to turn all
the (*&@#($*& glitz off?), as far as I can tell, the reporting
capabilities aren't all that far advanced of where we are. I haven't
started to dissect graphing - that's another email. However, in the
process there were a couple of interesting issues.
Anyway, here's a (paraphrased) list of reports that Quicken offers.
It offers both business and personal versions of many of these, but
as far as I can tell they are essentially the same report with a
different title.
I should apologise for the grammar in the following section - these
are basically working notes.
Reports:
* Income & Expense by category - essentially, this is a profit and loss
report, which we already have. We need to be able to specify which accounts
are included, and whether subaccounts should be consolidated? Quicken
also has a neat feature, where clicking on a figure in a summary
report brings up a transaction report. Can we duplicate? Can gtkhtml
(the new html widget) support a hyperlink that will get passed back to
a callback internal to gnucash, without turning gnucash into a
webserver and the security risks that entails?
* Budget
against actual - the above, but compared with budget figures.
When we have budgeting available, this one shouldn't be too tough.
* Periodic income/expense reports (over a year, by month, for
example). Don't have, but it's not hard.
* Transaction report - we have a good one already (need running
balance though) * net worth (balance sheet). Same deal - need to be
able to include and exclude accounts.
* Accounts Payable/Receivable.
Just a transaction report with appropriate accounts selected?
* Payroll isn't an issue yet.
* Tax-related transactions? Basically
just a transaction report with
appropriate accounts selected. Do we want to do this? Not
straight away, to be honest - too risky!
* Tax-return report. Income & Expense report with selected categories
- same caveats apply
as tax-related transactions
* Missing cheques? Not hard to implement, but isn't this what
reconciliation's for, and does
anyone ever use it?
* Sales tax reports.
Investment reports:
* Portfolio reports - already have to some extent. Relatively easy
* Investment performance report. Don't have, but need.
Have to be able to calculate ROI.
*Investment Income Report - Dividends
(taxable/non-taxable)
-Interest (taxable/non-taxable)
- capital gains
redistribution
- expenses.
- realized/unrealized
gain loss.
- All rather complex -
how can we distinguish
taxable/non-taxable
transactions?
To calculate income, we need the
cost basis of the shares. the cost
basis is difficult to calculate,
because precisely which shares
are we selling????
*Investment transaction report - not the same as other
transaction reports. Need to show how transactions have
changed either market value or cost basis. Cost basis is a
problem, as when you sell shares you have to know the cost of
the shares that you are selling. Is it the oldest, the
newest, what. Do we need to be able to specify that
explicitly?
Looking at Quicken's selection of reports, I suspect we could do worse
but to use their list as a good starting point.
The good news is that we actually don't need that many
different reports, and the non-investment ones aren't that complex.
As tax issues vary so much between jurisdictions, and are so complex,
and most people will get accounting advice on them anyway, I'm
hesitant to do them.
Instead, we need to give the ability for our
users to save report options. As we already have global options
saving code, I can't see this being a huge problem. In that way,
users can select the categories and dates that should be included in
the reports to make their own "tax reports" - or anything else.
To make this easier, we
need to be able to specify dates in a relative manner, such as "this
month" or "current accounting period".
Virtually all the information we need to create reports is already
available from the engine (and could be extracted a little more
efficiently given the extension to the engine interface discussed
previously). There is one exception to this, and it might pose a
thorny problem, which Richard Wackerbath pointed out before but I
admit I was not fully aware of the implications.
When calculating the cost basis of a holding of
shares, which you have bought at multiple blocks at different prices,
and then sold some of, it matters which ones you have sold.
If I buy 50 shares at $2.00, and 50 shares at $2.50, and then sell 25
shares, have I sold 25 shares that were bought at $2, 25 shares that
were bought at $2.50, or a combination of both lots? Quicken defaults
to assuming to a FIFO discipline, but lets you specify explicitly if
you wish. Accordinging to a friend who works at a big stockbroking
house, they use an weighted-cost (so the cost of the sold 25 shares
would be deemed to be $2.25) system. However, Quicken's system would
require us to keep track of from which block shares were sold from -
extra engine functionality. Will this be necessary or not?
The final issue I have is how we select which accounts are included in
reports, and which are displayed explicitly and which are subsumed
into the display of a parent account. I believe that a tree-based
widget could be constructed to do this, but an account selection
dialog with regular-expression selection (something like the windows
find-file dialog) might make the job easier. However, some careful
thought and experimentation might be necessary to get it right. Can
anybody give me some pointers as to a design which me might emulate?
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Robert Merkel [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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