GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 573663
Accounts have the wrong sort order for most european countries
Last modified: 2018-06-29 22:18:58 UTC
The following is derived from Bug 421766 – support "Passive" account type (able to contain both Liability and Equity accounts), especial Comment 5. In that bug might be also some additional useful information. If you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_sheet and click on other european languages, you can obey, that most have equity (capital social = long term) before liability (debit = short term). The general sort order of accounts there is: long term before short term. But it is not language specific, but country specific. E. g. Switzerland has short term first, while France, Germany and Italy use long term first. Affected are the sort orders in the chart of accounts and in most reports. Preferable there would be a country specific default setting (*), but a user preference or file specific setting should be enough on the first run. (*): Is there a way, to get the info from the translators, e.g. a translatable string: "l"/"1" for longterm first, "s"/"0" for short term first?
Would this be per set of books i.e. anyone who opened file aaa.gnc would have "European" order, or would this be per user, so any file opened by user Abc would have European order?
I think, it should be per file. Imagine you are the owner of MyCompany-CH and MyCompany-DE. The authorities of this countries wish to see their books in different sort orders. But I would suggest a list of known country specific default values derived form the wiki pages: CH:short [term first] DE:long FR:long IT:long US:short [for compatibility reasons also the default value for countries with unknown sort order]
(In reply to comment #0) > If you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_sheet and click on other > european languages, you can obey, that most have equity (capital social = long > term) before liability (debit = short term). I see no indication on any of those samples that the length of the account name has anything to do with sorting. The best way to sort accounts in the Accounts page is to assign account codes in the order that you want them to appear and to sort on those codes, although there are countries which specify the account codes as well; does the sort order correspond to the codes in all of those cases? We might need to introduce a "sort order" property to the Account class if there are cases where there's a mandatory code that doesn't order the CoA correctly.
Not the lenght of the string but the lenght in the timeline.
Ah, you mean as in how soon a debt is due? I don't see any way to do that without account codes or a sort order field.
Yes, the will do it this way, but she can not change the order between equity and liability which currently for many countries I know is wrong. But: We have in the report "Balance Sheet" the option "General->Use standard US layout". This should become a property of the book with a country specific default value stored in a table or like the ISO currencies. Then it should also be used by the chart of accounts and all other balance similar presentations.
(In reply to comment #6) > Yes, the will do it this way, but she can not change the order between equity > and liability which currently for many countries I know is wrong. Why not? > But: > > We have in the report "Balance Sheet" the option "General->Use standard US > layout". > This should become a property of the book > with a country specific default value stored in a table or like the ISO > currencies. > Then it should also be used by the chart of accounts and all other balance > similar presentations. Just make a custom report called "Non-US Balance Sheet" and save it. Then you can use it whenever you like. OTOH, we could easily check the locale and if it isn't en_US flip the default on that one option.
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