Add financial year value to date range dropdowns
Philip95
Member Posts: 18
When entering date range from drop-down, it is easy to select a year, quarter, month. But the financial year for most businesses does not correspond with calendar year. So, it would be very useful (and save time) to either:
allow user to name and save a custom date range (there is already a Custom sub-section at the bottom of the drop-down but it contains nothing), eg: user would be able to create a date range based on their FY dates and save this (as well as other date ranges they may be interested in).
include pre-loaded FY date range in the drop-down, which is driven by the FY settings for the business, eg: for Australia, FY20 is from 1 July 2019 -> 30 June 2020.
Both of these features would be useful, but I would be happy with just the second one. The number of times I have to manually select a FY date range from the calendar picker is insane, especially when using reports, searching for prior FY transactions, etc... this would make life just that bit easier, and I would expect quite easy to implement.
Comments
Hi @Philip95 , thanks for reaching out! To clarify, are you referring to drop-down menus in Reports? Or did you mean somewhere else? If so, you're looking to be able to save a custom date range in the reports? As it is right now in Wave, the default date range will be your business fiscal year first day up to today's date. For example, I just changed my fiscal year in my test account to Feb 4, and the report shows the start date of the range to be Feb 5:
As for changing the fiscal year in general, you can do so! Head to Settings > Accounting > Dates & Currency. There, you can change the year end so that your quarters all make sense! Learn more here as well.
@Philip95 there is one more suggestion though. Go to integrations and integrate Google Sheets. There you can view your financials, even monthwise in columns. This integration is great. Try it and let me know what you think about it. I can help you in case you have a problem in setting it up.
@CallieP, thanks for the info. This is good for current things, but what if I want to look at last year's FY (which I have to do a lot of during tax prep time) or the year before (which is also common), and then I can't use the date range, and have to go into both the From and To date picker and select year, month, day, every time. Twice!
Also, I want to see these default FY ranges in all date range pickers (eg: add in FY2018, FY2019, FY2020, just like they are for calendar years 2018, 2019, 2020), not just in reports. So, they should be default behaviour anytime a date range is required, and it is required in a lot more places than reports.
To be honest, having calendar year as a short-cut in the date range picker makes little sense... only ever interested in fiscal year for accounting.
@mhammadlatifACCA, thanks for your update also. I am aware of the Sheets integration, which is good, but for the sake of improved usability, these features that I describe should be added to the date range picker that is used across the whole solution (not just for reporting).
@Philip95 They can also be YTD, MTD and PTD as in advanced ERP solutions; what do you say?
@mhammadlatifACCA, sounds good, but I would be happy to just have FY in the list of predefined ranges.
What I don't understand is why such a simple feature addition still hasn't been added to all date range drop-downs... it's been raised/requested for years by various people.
@mhammadlatifACCA, the feature in essence is already in Wave, as there are predefined date ranges in the drop-down. The date range solution already looks up FY start date for default date range as per @CallieP 's comment - so they just need to extend this a tiny bit to include current and past FY's as selectable from drop-down.
Just do it already guys - Please!