Responses are interleaved below. Stan Brown Tehachapi, CA, USA https://BrownMath.com
On 2026-07-19 17:43, Stuart Longland via gnucash-user wrote: > I'm helping out the treasurer of a not-for-profit that has recently > switched over to using GNUCash (prior to this, they used spreadsheets). > The reports we used to generate via spreadsheets were closest in format > to the "General Journal" and "Balance Sheet (eguile-gnc)" reports, and > so we've been using those in the transition to the new software. Of course you know what reports your directors or members want, but I wonder about using the General Journal as a base. That level of detail tends to obscure the big picture, and I think it would be very hard for your stakeholders to get anything useful from it. Wouldn't an income statement be more useful? > At the moment we're running GNUCash 5.14 on Ubuntu Linux 26.04. > > At our monthly meetings, the financial statements historically have been > given month-to-month, with the annual general meeting, the treasurer > reports over the financial year. > > Here in Australia, our financial year runs from 1st July through to 30th > June the following year. I see the preferences allow me to specify an > "annual" fiscal year, but it assumes 1st January — 31st December: we > need to offset that by 6 months. Edit » Preferences » Accounting Period. > The "Balance Sheet (eguile-gnc)" report takes an "end date" which we can > manually configure, but the start date is not defined in the UI. A balance sheet doesn't have a start date and an end date. It is a snapshot of the organization's assets, liabilities, and equities as of close of business on a particular date. The normal heading would use the words "as of" or an equivalent, not "from" and "to" or "for the period...". The balance sheet doesn't use your accounting period, since it is a snapshot as of (the end of) a particular day, not a report of changes during some time period. It sounds like you create a balance sheet for each monthly directors' meeting. The easy way to do this is to open a balance sheet report, and in Options » General » Balance Sheet Date select End of previous month. Then click Save Config As and give the saved report a good descriptive name, like "Balance Sheet End of Last Month". Every month you'll just run that saved report and it will be ready for the directors. (Note: if you create any new asset, liability, or equity accounts, these will not automatically be added to the report. Use Options » Accounts and then save the report configuration with Save Config, not Save Config As.) > Presumably the software uses the date the account was first defined in > GNUcash — which will get increasingly less useful each month: members > would have to dig up *last* months' report and do a subtraction to see > month-to-month deltas. Without setting a start date for the report, > eventually we'll have financial tallies that represent years worth of > financial records. Apples and oranges here. The balance sheet as of a particular date _must_ reflect total debits minus credits for every asset account, total credits minus debits for each liability account, and total credits minus debits for every equity account, back to Day 1. Otherwise the numbers will be wrong. For example, if your asset line for checking account showed only the result of transactions from, say, June 1 through June 30 of this year, the figure would bear no resemblance to the amount of money actually in the account. And the same is true for every other account. Your mention of "deltas" tells me that what you want is a two-column balance sheet, showing balances as of the close of last month in one column, adjacent to the account titles, and balances as of the close of the previous month(*) in an additional column to the right. Your column headings would be e.g. June 30 and May 31, not June 30 and June 1. That will make it easy to see the increase or decrease of each account over the time period. (See the Balance Sheet Multicolumn report.) If you want also to show the amount of change, I'm not sure GC can do that natively, but you can always export the report to HTML, open it in Excel, and add formulas to compute the exact deltas. > As for the "General Journal", it's great to use for seeing where money > is going in and out of an organisation, but there's no start or end date > configuration, so it's over the entire period. This again makes it less > useful as time progresses. View » Filter by. But again, I really question the usefulness of reports at that level of detail. When I was on the board of our local orchestra, the treasurer gave us a list of deposits made and checks written every month, when what we really wanted to know what how much we had received in donations, how much in grants, and so on, and how much it had cost to put on each concert. I eventually started using GnuCash to show monthly and cumulative totals for each type of income and expense,(*) and offered it at the meetings since the treasurer's report was emailed in advance. (She didn't want to use GnuCash or any other accounting system, just a transaction list in Excel.) (*) Reports » Income & Expense » Profit & Loss. > Are there equivalent reports to the "General Journal" and "Balance Sheet > (eguile-gnc)" that allow us to report on explicit start/end dates? General Journal, yes; see Transaction Report. Balance Sheet, no, since that would report incorrect numbers. _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list [email protected] To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
