GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 627432
Preferences - Accounting Period
Last modified: 2018-06-29 22:43:23 UTC
It would be nice to be able to define a relative annual period with a start date other than 1st January. For instance, the UK tax year starts on 6th April. If it was possible just to specify day and month, the accounting period would not have to be amended every year. Likewise, there might also be a use case for a monthly accounting period, which does not start on the 1st?
I hope you don't mind my airing a bit of an adventurous idea: For the relative Accounting Period (AP) spec, isn't it superfluous defining start and end? Isn't the duration of a relative, recurring period always the same? If so, the end date is the day before the start of the next period. Then the relative AP could be specified as duration + starting point: - today - week : start 1...7 - month : start 1,2,...,31/last day of month - quarter : start day + month - year : start day + month Keep absolute AP definition as as is for needs not covered above. Note my suggestion to add a weekly period. These ideas tie in with my suggestion for the report date range: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627430.
With 2.4.0, the accounting period start/end date can be configured through Edit -> Preferences. Does that meet your request?
No that's not really what the OP asked. The problem with the current preference is that if you define an accounting period with absolute dates, you have to update that every year. There is currently no way to define an accounting period of one year that starts on July 1st of every year and forget about it. I agree with the OP that it would be good to improve on this.
Implemented by Geert in r20132 - thanks a lot!
This it not what I committed in r20132, sorry. R20132 deals with entering dates in the register (or wherever we use date fields) and how to interpret those dates when the user doesn't enter a year. The old behaviour (and still the default in r20132) is to interpret the date in the current year. A new option is now added to interpret such dates in a predefined sliding window around the current date. This was a patch proposed by Peter Selinger on the mailing list which I slightly modified. But that commit has unfortunately nothing to do with the request for a preference setting to define an accounting period that recurs yearly (so without having to explicitly type a year each time). I'm sorry for the confusion.
Oh, right. Nevertheless I think there was a bugreport asking for what you've committed now. It just wasn't this report here.
Indeed. I found bug 566175 for this request and closed that one accordingly.
Indeed, this would be very useful. Even in UK and US it's common for companies to have a financial year that's not the same as the calendar year or a tax year. For example, the GNOME Foundation in the US has a financial year that runs 1st Oct to 30th Sept, so we want all of the reports to use those dates. My company in the UK has a financial year that runs 1st of Feb to 31st Jan. In both these cases, I never want to run reports on a calendar year basis, but what I do want to do is specify current financial year for current budget tracking or previous financial year for tax returns.
Hi, For everyone (individual, companies and trusts) in Australia as with many other countries the financial year ends 31st June and starts 1st July. Unfortunately this bug / issue therefore affects all Australian users, so it's really very annoying. best solution would be to allow the configuration of the first day of a financial year to be used with the relative dates. I really hope this can be resolved in the next release....
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