There is need of introducing graphs / charting in the summary view. Most especially on Cash Flow chart, Profit and loss chart, Net Income chart and Expense breakdown pie chart.
This topic has been raised frequently before. Many users value Manager because it is not bloated with features unrelated to accounting. No matter how many graphics or charts might be provided, someone would always want something different, or in a different format. There are many charting applications available. One of the reasons the Export feature exists is so users can transfer data to their preferred application and design whatever charts they want. The developer concentrates on accounting features, not on replicating charting features available in other software.
I very frequently see this particular request for charts, that is visual reports as opposed to tabular reports.
I have always wondered what the benefit is for say a pie chart as opposed to a table displaying the same information? I personally think it’s much easier to get more detail from a tabular display - it just doesn’t look as pretty that’s all.
Secondly, I am interested in hearing what sort of reports you would find useful so that it gives me some ideas as to what reports I might want in my CRM system.
So far the only major report that I want is a proper budgeting tool where I can forecast the projected income for the next financial year and the expected expenditure. To some extent I can do this using Excel and the Budget Report in Manager but this is extremely limited. The system I plan to implement will save me a considerable amount of time over the course of the year as I will be using the API to pull the information that I want and display it accordingly.
As far as looking at Net Income and Expense breakdown, I actually find the Summary View to be excellent at giving me all the information that I need. This might be down to the fact that I have designed my COA to reflect my different income divisions and different areas of expenses. So I see no value in a pie chart as the summary page gives me a far better viewpoint of this in conjunction with profit and loss reports to view monthly averages etc.
Admittedly I don’t do a lot of reporting, so I may be missing what benefits there are with pie charts etc?