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Reports

Once you have spent a few months entering your financial details into GnuCash, you will start to appreciate the power that comes from having detailed records of your money habits. It's one thing to have all this information available, and yet another to organize it in a form that can help you spot trends or solve problems. Fortunately, GnuCash has a wide selection of reports to give you a firm grasp on almost every aspect of your financial life. Table 8-5 lists some of the most common reports and what you can expect each to tell you. You can access any of these reports by navigating through the Reports menu in the accounts window.

Table 8-5. GnuCash reports

Report

What it tells you

Account Summary

Gives you an at-a-glance view of the balances for each account.

Asset Barchart/Piechart

Lets you see how your net worth is divided. For most people, their net worth is primarily in their house, bank accounts, and retirement funds.

Liability Barchart/Piechart

Breaks down your liabilities by percentage. For most people, houses and cars are the greatest liabilities, followed by credit cards, and consumer and student loans.

Net Worth Barchart

Assets - Liabilities = Net Worth. This is a graphical representation of that formula. In general you want the blue and green bars to get higher, and the red bar to get lower.

Expense Barcart/Piechart

Shows you where your money is going. If you spend 80% of your money each month on clothes, this will let you know (assuming you have structured your expense accounts correctly).

Income Barchart/Piechart

Shows you where your money comes from. You may think that most of your money comes from your job, but this report may surprise you with how much of your money comes from other sources, such as Mom and Dad and contract work (once again, assuming you have set up your accounts correctly).

Most of these reports require you to have an intricate account tree set up to be truly informative. For example, if you have one big Expenses account to which you send all of your money, then the Expense Report will show that 100% of your money goes to Expenses—not very helpful. To get the most out of the report, you must structure your account tree so that each category of expenses has an account under the main Expenses account, and ditto for Income, Liability, and Assets. The more structured your accounts, the more you will get out of GnuCash .

By default, GnuCash reports from the start of the current year to the current date. You can change this (e.g., to show expense allocations for April) by clicking on the Options button in the toolbar.

When you activate a report, it creates a tab to the far left of the window; above that tab you should also see Accounts. Use this to switch back and forth between the accounts window and your reports. Click the Close button on a toolbar to close a report.

Clicking Exit will exit GnuCash; it will not close the report window!

Real-Life Examples

Learning the basics of GnuCash is one thing — actually using it in day-to-day scenarios is quite another. You have already seen how to enter a paycheck so that total income and tax expenses are recorded. Here are several other real-life examples to get you started on the most common tasks.

Going to the grocery store

We mentioned the importance of setting up a sufficiently detailed account structure before, but what we didn't tell you is how easy it is to do. You don't have to set all those accounts up in advance. Knowing that you can create them as you go along gives you the motivation to do it right.

Here's what to do:

Open the Checking Account register.

Create a new transaction with today's date and Grocery Store as the description.

In the transfer field, enter Ex, and expenses will be selected automatically. Use the right arrow key to complete the auto entry. Now type :Food. The colon tells GnuCash to make Food a subaccount of Expenses.