Income, liability and equity balances, which until now we have
always displayed as negative numbers, are now shown as normally positive
by these reports.
Negative numbers now indicate a contra-balance (eg an overdrawn
checking account), a net loss, a negative net worth, etc.
This makes these reports more like conventional financial statements,
and easier to read and share with normal people.
Compound balance commands like these can now be aware of normal account
balance sign, and sort negative balances accordingly.
This also adds utility-ht as a dependency, only for the uncurry function
right now but it looks potentially useful to have.
This patch fixes a bug that happened when using the -H option on
a period without any transaction. Previously, the behavior was no
output at all even though it should have shown the previous ending balances
of past transactions. (This is similar to previously using -H with -E,
but with the extra advantage of not showing empty accounts)
Of the 2 tests, the first is a simple test on a specific period.
The second is expected to fail at this point until the new upcoming
code to fix the issue with the history option is implemented.
For the record : this issue happens when we use the -H flag for a period
that does not contain any transactions. Currently, the ending balance
values are only taken into account if the current period contains
a Transaction containing one of the previous populated accounts.
For example, if we have a statement on the 2008/01/01 for $1
and we do a command (with -H) to check the value on the
(without transactions) 2008/01/02, we will not get the $1 from
2008/01/01. In that same example, if we had a transaction for the same
account as 2008/01/01 in say 2008/01/03 then the -H command would
successfully show the statement from 2008/01/03 with the initial amount
that we set in 2008/01/01.
- try to clarify naming and meaning of balance/register report modes
and kinds of "balance" displayed. Added balance --change and
register --cumulative flags to clarify report modes.
- with multiple --change/--cumulative/--historical flags use the last
instead of complaining
- register -A is now affected by -H
- options cleanups
-H/--historical now makes a single-column balance report with a start
date show historical balances reflecting earlier postings. This is
equivalent to specifying no start date, but it's more consistent.
Previously, a depth:0 query produced an empty report (since there are no
level zero accounts). Now, it aggregates all data into one summary item
with account name "...".
This makes it easier to see the kind of data Gwern was looking for from
register-csv (net worth over time). Eg this shows one line per month
summarising the total of assets and liabilities:
hledger register-csv -- -MHE ^assets ^liabilities depth:0
Single and multi-column balance reports behave similarly.
multicolumn balance reports only show accounts with activity (postings)
during the report period, by default. Sometimes you want to show
accounts which have an interesting balance, even if they have no
activity during the period. -E now does this, in addition to showing
leading & trailing empty columns.
Previously, the first period's heading would show the start date of a
full period, but postings after this date but before the user-specified
report start date were not shown. Now those postings will be included,
making the first column's numbers more correct. Similarly, the report
end date is now adjusted to the displayed end date on the last column.
Periodic, cumulative and historical multicolumn balance reports are now
generated by one code path, which helps with consistency and reducing
the bug/test surface. --tree now also works with --cumulative or
--historical.
Multicolumn balance reports can now be switched to a hierarchical view
with --tree. This is similar to the single column balance report with
--no-elide, ie we do not elide boring parents into the following line.
The --flat and --tree flags are opposites; the last one to appear on
the command line is decisive (in future, if not already).
Changes include:
- flat mode now shows exclusive (subaccount-excluding) balances.
This is a deviation from ledger, but seems simpler and clearer
for users and implementors across the various modes.
- in flat mode, --depth now aggregates deeper accounts at the
depth limit, rather than just excluding them from the report.
This is more useful.
- in flat mode, --empty no longer shows parent accounts with
no postings.
- more tests, more debug output, clearer code
