Hello,
Today, I tried out the "Balance Sheet (Multicolumn)" report in the
Experimental reports section, and I'd like to share some observations.
1. When initially run, I receive an empty report. This is similar to the
initial result of the basic Transaction report, except in the latter
case, users are given a note that links them to the report options. It
would seem to me that at the least, this report should do the same. A
better solution in both cases would be to have initial parameters that
return some kind of data--however unrelated to the user's end
goal--rather than an empty page. It seems to me that users are better at
changing something they see that is wrong, rather than trying to conjure
it up out of thin air. (the famous quote from US Supreme Court Justice
Potter Stewart regarding obscenity comes to mind here: "I know it when I
see it. This is not it."). In the Balance Sheet, changing the Period
Duration setting from its default "None" to anything else (I'd suggest
"Year") yields data from which a user can build. (I have no suggestions
for the Transaction Report.)
2. The report defaults to including all accounts, including hidden and
placeholder accounts. While there is an option on the Accounts tab to
display hidden accounts, I think the decision to include hidden accounts
in the report by default is confusing, given that the Account tab
doesn't display hidden accounts by default. I think it makes more sense
for the report either to default to omitting hidden accounts, or to
default to displaying hidden accounts in the options dialog. I see that
the standard Balance Sheet report also includes hidden accounts by
default, although this is masked because the standard report limits the
accounts to 3 levels (the Experimental report defaults to All levels). I
will note that there is an option on the Display tab to omit zero
balance accounts, which may have been seen as a way to skip hidden
accounts. However, while it may not be prudent or common practice to
hide accounts that have balances, there is nothing in the program to
prevent this, which means that hiding zero balance accounts is not the
same as including hidden accounts. I'll note that if I Clear All and
then click Select All on the Accounts tab, the report properly omits all
hidden accounts, which it should also do by default. I suggest that both
reports should default to omitting Hidden accounts on opening, and that
the default level setting should be the same for both.
3. The report propagates balances all the way up the account hierarchy,
which makes sense for accounts denominated in a currency. However, with
accounts denominated in commodities (such as Stock or Mutual Fund
accounts), it makes less sense, and in fact renders the report extremely
difficult to follow, especially with accounts with many different
commodities. Seeing a full listing of all 150 different commodities (and
various subsets thereof) repeated for
Assets,
Assets:Investments,
Assets:Investments:Taxed,
Assets:Investments:Taxed:Self, and
Assets:Investments:Taxable:Self:Brokerage A
gets old and confusing very quickly. It would be better to propagate
totals for the book currency only, and leave the tallying of stock and
mutual fund holdings to the Advanced Portfolio report. I will note that
initially, I was going to ask why some entries in the report were listed
as hyperlinks, while others were not. After some puzzling, I figured out
that the non-linked entries were summarizations of holdings further down
the hierarchy. Removing the numerous duplications of commodity
summmarizations would at least make it a little clearer what is going on
in this regard. I will further note that the standard report does not
repeat this information up the hierarchy.
Best,
David T.
_______________________________________________
gnucash-user mailing list
gnucash-user@gnucash.org
To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe:
https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see
https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information.
-----
Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
