OK, now that guppi is starting to move along, we might like to start
thinking about what kinds of graphs we want. Again, I've dissected
Quicken's reporting capabilities, and am presenting a list of reports
that we might consider implementing ourselves.
Quicken's charting features are basically noninteractive. Its chart
has a toolbar with a customize button up top, which brings up a dialog
box. All the graphs are rendered in fake-3D, but all the graphs are
either bar, stacked bar, line or pie graphs. Simple stuff, but nice
and clear. The good news is that for a home-finance package this
level of graphical capability is apparently state-of-the-art.
If we want eye candy, if guppi ends up supporting true 3D graphing we could
use some of those :)
Income and Expense graphs:
Quicken supports two sorts of these - bar graphs by period, and a pie
chart summarizing either income sources and expenses by category. It
normally displays the two simultaneously, but there is no great
benefit from it IMHO. You can select which categories and accounts
are included.
I think we can do better - I think we could have the option to have
stacked bars so that major subgroups (categories by a meta tag, for
instance) could be viewed in the barchart. Additionally, we could
should be able to display multiple pie charts for regular time
intervals. As well, when selecting by account, we should be able to
specify a depth to which accounts are done individually - below that,
they should be consolidated for presentation. However, it would be cool if
we could expand or collapse account groups from the graph display.
Budget graphs:
This of course depends on how the budgeting system develops (what are
your plans here, Dave?)
However, Quicken's idea is simply to present income (categorized)
over the budget period vs. actual, and a third bar showing the dollar difference,
and a similar graph for expenses.
There are a couple of issues (which really also apply to the budget
report too) - what do we do when the budget is specified for a
different time scale to the report? My view would be to simply
rescale the budget figure. Similarly, what do we do for subaccounts
and parent accounts for budgeting? For flexibility, higher-level
accounts should be allowed to contain overall budget figures, and by
default budget graphs should be displayed down to the level at which
they are specified. If people expand further, you simply divide the
budget figure by the number of categories as a "guess" result, and
indicate that it's not a specified figure by using a different colour.
Of course, budget views should also be able to be consolidated by
fields other than "account". Above and below budget figures should be
able to be presented as percentage figures, as well as by absolute
values.
Another view that might be useful is two pie charts which show the
budgeted and actual proportions of income/expenses.
Net worth graph:
The only way that a graph can show anything useful about net worth is
to show its growth (hopefully) over time. So I would propose a bar -
or more likely a line graph which shows assets, liabilities, and net
worth over a period. We could just take data points at discrete
intervals, but there isn't any reason why we couldn't (optionally) use
more intervals and (optionally) some averaging and smoothing techniques.
Portfolio Balance:
This is a simple pie chart showing where investments are concentrated.
We obviously want something like this. We would want to be able to
subdivide by investment type (stocks/mutual funds/property/cash etc.),
as well as being able to subdivide further (ie be able to distinguish
by meta tag as well), and also display weightings by individual
stock/fund etc.
Also useful would be a sequence of pie charts showing how weightings
have changed over time.
Investment performance:
Again, Quicken displays two graphs simultaneously here, and I'm not
sure of the usefulness of it. They have a stacked bar graph showing
the value of various asset classes in your portfolio on a monthly
basis, and a bar graph showing the internal rate of return for each
security, with a line showing the average IRR.
I've already had one suggestion of an additional piece of investment
analysis from Bob Stanfield (see a previous mail), but I'd like more
suggestions on this!
In summary, there's nothing here that we can't easily duplicate - and
indeed, the account hierachy we have, and the more flexible
information we will have with the new engine and file format, we
should be able to improve on this set considerably. From my
perspective, the major challenge I think we face is designing some
options to be able to select which accounts to include, and whether
they should be consolidated - another version of the same issue as
report design. I guess I'll have to spend some time
playing with the Gtk+ tree widget, and see what I can come up with.
What else do people want from graphs in gnucash?
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Robert Merkel [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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