How can I show more detail in GnuCash Reports?

Question

I recently started using GnuCash as a tool for tracking my expenses. It has lovely built in reports on expense, but it seems to limit the categories/accounts displayed to a fairly low number (I think 8 for the bar chart, and 6 for the pie chart) lumping several of the smaller items into the "other" category. However I'm more immediately concerned about controlling my smaller expenses (dining, entertainment, etc).

How can I configure the reports to show me the detail about all expenses, or a limited set of expenses?

Answer 1

I'm going to take the “Expense Piechart” report in GnuCash 2.6.7 as my primary example; other reports may have slightly different options.

1. Open the report you want to use.
2. Click “Options" in the toolbar or “Report Options” in the Edit menu.
3. In the “Accounts” tab, the “Show Accounts until level” option (or “Account Display Depth” in some other reports) cuts off subaccounts, and you may wish to increase it. For example, I keep expense accounts like “Expenses:Entertainment:Games”, and if I want to see that specific account I have to set this option to 3, instead of the default 2.
4. In the Display tab, the “Maximum Slices” (“Maximum Bars” for bar charts) controls how many accounts are shown before the rest are grouped as an “Other” entry. However, it only goes up to 24.

If you want to keep this configuration for future use, you can either leave the report tab open indefinitely, or save a custom report using the “Save Report Configuration As…” command in the toolbar or Reports menu.

---

Since you asked about expenses in particular: if you are looking for a complete list with more than 24 items, you can use the Income & Expense → Cash Flow report. This report will list out every expense account (and income account, separately) with nonzero transactions. However, it does not have a pie at all and does not display percentages.

Answer 2

I found it! This is something I'd been searching for on-and-off over the last couple years.

The code that generates the charts is in your gnucash program files, in scm\report\standard-reports. (Different operating systems will have things put in slightly different places. You can search inside gnucash for "standard-reports".) In files like account-piechart.scm or category-barchart.scm, you can search for the word "Maximum" twice to find something that looks like this:

(add-option
     (gnc:make-number-range-option
      gnc:pagename-display optname-slices
      "c" (N_ "Maximum number of slices in pie.") 7
      2 24 0 1))

(It'll be "Maximum number of bars" in the barchart one.)

That 24 in the last line is the maximum value, so just change that to be something much higher, like 99. Save it, restart gnucash, and follow the usual advice to set the number of slices/bars in your reports, this time without such a low maximum number. Keep in mind your legend would be unwieldy. (If you export your reports to HTML, you can edit the JavaScript to turn the legend off. I don't know if there's a setting in gnucash.)