On 9/3/2023 2:43 PM, Paras Desai wrote:
Hi Ken
Thanks for your kind reply and efforts in explaining a way.
Apparently, it appears that there is no alternative but to run reports on two
dates and compare or do some analysis.
Any reports comparing two period is a desirable thing in finance and
accounting, may it be personal accounting.
Thanks
Paras
You are quite correct, comparing two periods is desirable.
What perhaps is confusing you is "a report" vs "comparing two runs of
that report". Yes of course, there COULD be a report Y that compared two
X reports. But there are some good reasons where that might best be done
"outside". There might quite possibly be the need for some human
decision making. I'll give a different report as an example (but one
where "as of date A" is commonly compared to "as of date B")
Consider the Balance Sheet report. We are suggesting that to produce a
report comparing "as of date A" with "as of date B" you rut the two
reports, export, bring into a spreadsheet or something else you can
edit, and there produce the final report. Why? Why not an automatically
generated report? Well IF there is a one to one correspondence of
accounts "as of date A" vs "as of date B" this would be simple << you
can imagine a new report in gnucash called "Compare Balance Sheets" to
which you would supply two dates >> But what if the CoA "as of date A"
does NOT correspond 1:1 to the CoA "as of date B"? Accounts could have
been added, accounts could have been deleted, accounts could have
changed names, etc. You expect a computer (even with a pretty good AI
application) to be able to figure out what has happened and to line
things up properly?
Situation 1: Account A present at date 1, absent at date 2, while
account B present at date 2 not present at date 2.
Situation 2: No actual change except account A was renamed account B
As a human bookkeeper, you know which happened (hopefully you remember)
Michael D Novack
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