Good question — I think the budget reports are fine, it seems to be the chart that is the odd one out.
As it is currently, for all of the budget reports, you choose the budget you want to report on and the range is determined accordingly. You can’t set it independently. I have no problem with this. I can’t see why someone would want to select a budget to report or chart, but want GC to use transactions from out of the budget period. (well, for comparing performance, sure, but it doesn’t work that way anyway, the Transaction Report is better suited there - see below) But for the chart, you can choose, as in my example, last year’s budget (or anything other than current year) but the default date window is for this year, which would render no data. Since you can select the budget and date range separately, you can easily end up with either no results, incomplete results, or possibly non-sensical results. For consistency, the chart should probably pull the date range from the budget choice like the reports do and not offer the options to set the range independently. ----- Now, if the reports and charts allowed you to independently select a budget and date-range for comparison of budget vs. actual (of the chosen period) that would be much more versatile. As it presently stands, you have to copy or re-do your budget each year/quarter. But if you could report a static budget against variable periods, you could have budgets based on something other than dates. (such as different scenarios, regardless of the period) Making the change that direction would not remove the ability to produce and analyze budget performance on a period basis though. If that route is chosen, I’d suggest some sort of default report/chart page to explain what options need to be chosen to get a desired result. (similar to how some other reports tell you that you need to select some accounts or certain options, rather than just dumping you to a blank page. Note, this would be a good improvement for any report/chart that requires setting options to get a usable result or non-blank page.) I’m not sure how difficult it would be to have the reports and chart look for budgeted amounts statically but actual performance based on a separately specified range. This might also necessitate some change to the budget options where you would assign values for a generic period without regard to a specific year. While that all might be nice, the easiest thing to fix right now, I think would be to pattern the General tab of the budget chart similar to the various budget reports. Regards, Adrien > On Jan 23, 2019, at 10:14 AM, Christopher Lam <christopher....@gmail.com> > wrote: > > Directed towards Adrien- how should the budgeting reporting options look like? > > Budget has start-date and num(periods) > > Budget-report-date has its own start-date and end-date -- they should be > removed? > > I don't use the budgeting tools myself. > > (ytd-budget.scm from years back seems to be a good report) > > On 23/1/19 11:37 pm, Adrien Monteleone wrote: >> This means the date range for the report (default is start & end of current >> accounting period) does not match the budget. >> >> For example, I opened a chart for the 2018 budget and got a blank page. >> >> When I changed the date range to start & end of previous year, I got charts >> for my selected accounts with budget and actual bars. >> >> Regards, >> Adrien >> > _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
