For example I have several expense accounts such as Accounting, Advertising, Bank Charges which I have categorised under Company Expenditure within the expenses chart of accounts.
But I also have petrol allowance, salary and heating and lighting expenses which I have categorised under Employee Expenditure.
What I would like to see is the totals for Company Expenditure and Employee Expenditure next to the headings.
Ticking the expenses box within the subaccount does not seem to change anything on the chart of accounts. Is this possible?
Sorry what I mean was is it possible to view the totals on the summary page. I have just looked at the profit and loss and I see that it does have the totals there, but not on the summary page.
Brilliant. I will give you an Easter present and say that now that I have created sub accounts and split the expenses, assets and liabilities into different groups I will acknowledge that the new summary page does have advantages over the old summary page. Once the subtotals are on the summary page, then I think that the new summary page will be nearly perfect as the only thing that I would want to change is the colour scheme of the summary page.
One nice advantage of the new summary page is that I can set summary page as accrual and profit and loss as cash basis.
If you don’t categorised them as sub-groups of Expenses, then they will appear on the summary.
Once the other features are added then you can categorised them back
Now I understand what the expenses box does in chart of accounts editing mode! I was wondering how that worked - one is meant to use that if not putting category in expenses or income!
I tried your method and while it does give me the sub totals, it means that I lose the total for expenses overall so for the moment I have reverted back to using the categories until I have thought about how I want to display the information. I have also created a third category for expenses where I have put all the cost of sales type expenses so that in the company expenses I only have operating costs.
I will give this a bit more thought and decide what information I want to extract. Your method might be very good for breaking up the liabilities as I don’t see the need to have the tax and payables in the same section as payables are monthly and taxes are generally quarterly.
Thanks for the tip - very useful. as I didn’t know that I could split the thing like that!
The latest version will show group totals in light gray on Summary screen. I’m making it light gray for now because I’m not sure I feel about it yet.
I know what you mean. I am sort of undecided how I want to present the information either as sub categories or split them as Brucanna suggested. I need to think about that.
@dalacor, Only used the group splitting so the “sub-totals” appeared on the Summary tab, as the BS/P&L reports are never printed off. Will probably revert to Expense sub-groups if they included associated sub totals on the Summary Tab, then Total Expenses can also be displayed.
I wasn’t sure about the grey font either at first, but I think I like it. I agree that the sub-totals need to have some sort of differential treatment in font style, colour, shading, or indentation to the individual items, and the grey seems to work.
One thought is that you may want to suppress the sub-totals if there is only one item in the group. Otherwise, you see the same number twice:
Cash              8,765,432.10(<–pretend that’s grey)
       Cash       8,765,432.10(<–pretend that’s blue)
It keeps getting better! (I’d still like to see aged receivables broken down under the A/R account on the summary page, but…)
I have just updated to the latest version to see the sub totals in grey. I would actually advise using black for the moment until you have decided on what colour scheme you want overall for summary page. While I have no difficulty reading the grey totals although its not as visible as I would like, grey on white is not a good contrast colour for elderly people. My mother says anything with grey writing on a white background she doesn’t bother reading, because she struggles to read it as its not a good contrasting colour.
I would do something like have grey or red backgrounds over the area where it says expenses, income, liability, equity and assets and make the font say a navy white (if red background) or perhaps red font (if grey background) to keep colour scheme of manager. Then make sub group text and totals say orange and then use red font for expenses totals and green fonts for income totals. Or you could go with a blue, orange, grey and green colour scheme!
I find that the current blue font colour for totals and background yellow looks a bit dated as yellow backgrounds and html blue in that shade was very big in the 90’s as it were. Manager logo is red and white so perhaps you should develop a summary page colour scheme that works with your logo.
Anyway I am off topic - the point is grey writing on a white background is not a good contrast colour and older people over 50 will have problems reading the text.
Lubos could spend $26 million to ask the general public to submit ideas on what colours and treatments to use, then have a professional committee narrow it down to five finalists (two of which could be nearly identical), then have a general referendum of all Manager users to rank the five options, then have a second general referendum to decide between the top-ranked new option or the legacy option, and finally wind up keeping it exactly the same.
Perhaps I should say some older people find it difficult to read. Yes, I was rather interested in New Zealand spending all that time on the flag and then ending up keeping it the same! Rather funny that.
as I didn’t know that I could split the thing like that!
