Add "tomorrow" to the list of symbolic dates for defining reports
The symbolic dates (eg - today, start of financial period, start of previous month, etc) are useful in creating "everlasting" report definitions. However, to create a report of forward transactions one needs to enter the date, as "today" will include transactions also appearing in "to date" reports.
Alternatively, an ability to add an increment (or decrement), in days, from an existing symbolic date (eg: today+1) might be even more useful and flexible.
Colin Scott
shared this idea
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Sjoerd Op 't Land commented
For my personal bookkeeping, throughout the year, I would like to average my monthly expenses and income _over the last year_. That is: from today-1y to today. That way, yearly recurrent expenses and revenues are correctly spread out over the months, but the reports automatically use the most recent data available.
Likewise, with the bar graph or histogram view of my monthly revenues/expenses, I would always like to see 12 bars (the last 12 months). Selecting 'Start of this year' to 'Today' only gives me two bars in February.
In an attempt to reduce the popup dates, one could introduce an hierarchy
Begin date entry:
- This accounting period
- Begin of this
-- Year
-- Trimester
-- Month
- Relative
-- Today
-- Yesterday
-- One month ago
-- One trimester ago
-- One year ago
-- Ever (first book entry)End date entry:
- This accounting period
- End of current
-- Year
-- Trimester
-- Month
- Relative
-- Today
-- Tomorrow
-- In a month from now
-- In a trimester from now
-- In a year from now
-- Ever -
Colin Scott
commented
I am Treasurer of my Rotary Club. I provide a monthly report so each of our service committees knows how much they have "in the bank". This report uses "today" as its date, so I simply print it and it works.
Some spending decisions are made in advance, and so we have forward-dated transactions - sometimes 2 or 3 years ahead! - in the accounts. Each committee therefore needs to know not only its current balance, but their future commitments, and for this I produce a transactions report of all forward-dated transactions. Initially I had this set up as from today to (I think!) 01-Jan-2025, and it ran automatically - but then I realised that it showed today's transactions, which is wrong because they are already reflected in today's balance. To fix it at present I need to manually enter tomorrow's date whenever I run the report, which is a slight pain!
An increment/decrement facility would suit me fine for this, and the flexibility it offers is potentially quite useful, though I can't offhand think of any specific instances. It might be a way in which you could get rid of one or two symbolic dates, though! :-)
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Admincstim
(Core Developer, GnuCash)
commented
Well, I'm a bit hesitating to allow more symbolic dates because the current list of possible date selections is already quite long. Can you elaborate a bit on your use case, i.e., on the sort of "forward report" you want to generate?
We've received proposals to add plenty of other symbolic dates in the past, but IMHO the dropdown box shouldn't contain more than, say, 8 entries, so we declined quite a few of those proposals. Your idea with "today + x" does make sense, though.