Re: Of account translations, account hierarchies and gifi codes

* account translations are on master and 1.4
* I've taken the implementation of support for account hierarchies as an opportunity to completely re-implement the PNL and balance sheet generating code. As a side-effect, that code now also supports generating GIFI reports.

Status of this last step is that the links on the original reports need to be restored and that non-html outputs need to be adapted to the new driver program. Other than that, the change is ready to be merged.

On Sep 7, 2015 12:56 PM, "Erik Huelsmann" <..hidden..> wrote:

Hi all,

There are a lot of items that I'm currently working on, so, I need to organize my thoughts a bit. And as I'm sorting through my thougts, I'm using the opportunity to explain to you what I intend to do.

The reason I have to write this out is that the things I'm working on all affect financial reports:

* GIFI
* Account translations
* Account hierarchies

To address the latter: LedgerSMB has "always" had account hierarchies (at least as long as I've been using it -- which is sometime pre-1.3). However, these account hierarchies have always been completely useless (unused), other than that they posed restrictions on the accounts that could be loaded.
Many (including myself) want to use account headings to define subtotals in the Income Statement and Balance Sheet reports. Work to this extent started in May on my 'headings-subtotals' branch, but got stalled due to my multi-currency work. The branch contains mostly changes to queries in order to roll up account totals into their respective account headings. Today, I'm approaching the same issue from the reporting side on the master-report-headings branch, which restructures the balance sheet and Income statement reports in order to be able to show the account hierarchies.
It's my plan to finish the headings-subtotals branch (it's currently lacking the balance sheet's roll-up) and then merge it into the master-report-headings branch. One problem that I'm running into here is that we don't have a way to tell which heading "is" the PNL total. As such, additional configuration will be required when it lands in a release.

Working my way back through the list, the next item is account translations. A branch addressing this topic has been merged to master as well as 1.4. However, due to the restructuring of the previous item, much of that work is invalidated again: while the accounts and the immediate headers are being translated, there currently isn't an entire hierarchy to show and thus not to be translated. This work then needs to be re-done.

Last but not least, the GIFI reports. GIFI is currently only available on 1.4 in the Income Statement report. The balance sheet remains to be done (although it was available on 1.3). The code structure set up for "account hierarchies" allows me to easily do GIFI reports.

Before I started writing the above, I wasn't really comfortable landing the account hierarchies on 1.4, because with that code, as things stand now, the current layout of Income/Expenses and Assets/Liabilities is only supported by user configuration. However, while writing this, I think I could (easily) add to 1.4 - as a transitional measure - the old method to support those who are on 1.4 but have their account hierarchy not fully up to date yet. With this additional piece of functionality, I'm now no longer hesitant to want to have this change on 1.4: it resolves an outstanding issue (gifi) with very little extra work.

Note that the above isn't a complete listing of what I'm working on as work on e.g. the multi-currency branch also continues.

Sorry for the lenghy mail. If you have any comments, please add them. If you don't, no problem, you just helped me sort my thoughts! :-)

--
Bye,

Erik.

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