Predefined periods on reports

ideas
1

In the past I’ve submitted wrong VAT tax return forms, because I mistyped an end date. In most cases you’ll need predefined reporting periods. This is usually 1 year (1/1 - 31/12), every quarter, and every month.

Some businesses don’t align their fiscal year with the calendar year, so my solution would be:

Be to be able to define periods in settings, and then be able to use these periods when creating reports. This would also be used for certain dates (opening and closing balances)

For example:
:
2023 Q1 → start + end date
2023 Q2 → start + end date
2023 Full Year → 1/1 → 31/12
(and maybe a button or way to just generate them as time comes). But the names should be arbitrary

In the reports (P/L for example), you would be able to either select a manual period, or select a named period. The named-period shouldn’t just fill the dates, as you might have made a mistake when creating the period, and when fixing this, you’ll have to go through all reports that would’ve used this

In reports that need a specific point in time, I’d suggest adding “start of / end of” in a similar way.

2

I don’t think this is a bad suggestion, it should be relatively simple to hide Date from and Date from fields and include a Period field.

If none of the default periods match the needs of the user, they can select Custom and then the Date from and Date from fields would appear.

But what do you suggest for default periods?

3

If selecting the period isn’t going to fill (and therefore use) the dates, what is the point of defining it?

4

I mean structurally, the start/enddates should be references through the Period, so that when you update a period, it will reflect (including the period name) to that report.

5

I have thought the functionality would be helpful for some time. For a description of a jurisdiction independent solution see Datepicker Defaults - Feature Request - #2 by Patch

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