One thing I’d like to be able to do from time to time, is create a GL report with the balances of a sub-set of GL accounts.
The three seeded custom GL reports are good but they are all or nothing. Sometimes I’d like to get those for a specific sub-set of GL accounts.
Custom reports are fantastic too but here again I can get to the gl_transaction level but the group by isn’t quite a SQL group by that sums by the group by column so you can’t really get to an ‘account balance’ in custom reports, nor is there an ‘OR’ in the select criteria to allow a group of accounts to be selected.
Here is an example of the type of report where I’d like to be able to pick specific accounts - e.g. “Available funds for an LLC”
Cash at bank
less: accounts payable
less: accrued liabilities
less: engine reserve
= “Available Funds”
Are you aware you can now define the General Ledger Transactions report for a specific account? It isn’t “all or nothing” anymore. Granted, this does not give you a flexibly chosen subset, only one account, but it avoids dealing with all your accounts at once.
I certainly don’t mean to be flippant, but looking at the Summary page and punching four numbers into a calculator seems a lot easier and faster than defining any sort of report.
The short one was just an example. I have two or three that I like to send out to people on a recurring basis, and being able to create them and email directly from manager as I do with other reports would be nice. Really the ‘idea’ here is being able to get to account balances either via custom reports or in some manner.
You can actually generate the whole general transaction ledger report through custom reports.
The problem is that the where clause doesn’t support the possibility to choose between AND or OR.
A possible solution could be putting some sort of flag in the name of the accounts you want to select. Under this point of view, it would be great to have custom fields for the chart of accounts’ elements.
Yup, exactly. No, OR or AND. Also the group doesn’t really sum detail, so you can’t get to an account total/balance in custom reports either, rather you have the gl transaction level detail, sometime I want to be able to pull the account balance.
The existing custom reporting is pretty amazing and I have been able to pull off several surprisingly decent reports for various needs.
Again, just an observation or ‘idea’ that could perhaps be used at some point to allow a little more customized financial/GL reporting with a little less exporting and manipulating.
It’s important to remember what is in the database: lists and transactions. The function of the program is to massage those into useful results. It’s certainly legitimate to wish the program included tools for manipulating the data into different results. But many users have difficulty with built-in reports, and bigger trouble with simple custom reports. So it is only realistic to recognize what a big undertaking it would be to create a set of tools that could be used by novices without programming skills.
Probably true, so (at the risk of having to rename the thread ) how about this for a simplified alternative ‘idea’:
Make the option to select an account that is already available on the General ledger transactions report a multi-select. i.e. with the ability to select multiple accounts.
Add the same thing to the General Ledger summary report;
That combination would cover 90% of these types of reporting needs without custom reports by giving the option to get a summary of or detail for a selection/sub-set of accounts rather than simply either one or all accounts without needing to understand any of the SQLesque parameters of a custom report at all.
Probably we should have two levels of custom.report, basic and advanced: first one with visual interface, second one with SQL language or something similar.
) how about this for a simplified alternative ‘idea’: