Addition of a new report type: flow reports

Preamble

I keep my accounts using abandon, a text-based accounting tool I have developed, so that I don't have to use proprietary closed-source tools. Since the entries are text-based I can commit my accounting data to a git repository, and reap all the benefits that come with that.

Today, when I was trying to tally my accounts, I felt the need to interactively query and filter my reports so that I could cross-check some numbers. However, I was running short of time; a tax reporting deadline was mere hours away.

That's when an idea struck me. If I could get a flow report for each account, most of my querying needs would be met! The report would show a summary of where the money flowed from and to each account. This would be much easier to implement than an interactive query system, so I dived right into the code.

What do you mean by "Flow report"

I don't know whether this idea already exists and whether there's a standard name for it. But anyway, here's the idea in a nutshell:

For each highlighted account, the flow of money is listed. In the above example, the cash account is being debited by one account (the bank), and credited by three accounts (an asset and two expense accounts).

This makes it very easy to spot mistakes in the books. I can't show a screenshot of my actual books, but I spotted two errors by just glancing through the report!

Release 1.0

I have commited this feature along with other changes that bring all dependencies up to date.

I am releasing this as version 1.0 of the tool. I hope it helps others as much as it helped me.

Release 1.1

Note: There was a bug in flow reports of release 1.0. Multi-pronged transactions weren't rendered correctly. I have fixed it and released 1.1. The screen shot above is now from version 1.1.

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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