Saturday, September 13, 2014

Update to my printer-friendly Pocketbook report template


Recently, I built a printer-friendly version of Pocketbook’s Analyse feature. It was functional, but not very refined. I have spent a little time polishing it.

The new features are as follows:
  • Categories created by users no longer need to be added in manually. If you add new categories using Pocketbook, they will update once you click ‘Refresh PivotTable Data’. 
  • Categories can now be shown by both ‘Parent Category’ and ‘Detailed Category’ e.g. ‘Entertainment’ and ‘Entertainment – Drinks’ respectively. The Source Data tab has a function to define the Parent Category by looking at the Detailed Category string.
  • Because of this, the Income and Expenses by Category tables can now (and do) show a summary by the Parent Category. 
  • The Expenses by Category graph is now beside the ‘Income/Expenses Breakdown’ graph on the Report tab. It also now summarises transactions by the Parent Category and the categories are flipped to show to highest expenditure category at the top of the graph. 
  • A breakdown of the detailed categories is now given on the ‘Report p.2’ tab. This allows you to drill down, once you have the overall picture. If need be, you can look at the individual transactions by filtering the ‘Source Table’ worksheet. 
  • A new button has been added to the ‘Report’ tab that allows the ‘Transferring Money’ category to be excluded from the PivotTables (it is excluded from the Reconciliation table by default). If you want to put them back, just click ‘Refresh PivotTable Data’ again.
The only thing that needs to be done manually now is to load the latest transaction data from Pocketbook into the ‘Source Table’. Once that is done, just hit ‘Refresh PivotTable Data’ on the Report tab, and watch it work! 

Pocketbook has over 100,000 users now, so again I hope others find this useful. Unfortunately, I’ve only got my own data to test this on, so debugging can be a little difficult. If you have any problems, suggestions, questions or feedback about it, feel free to leave me a comment below.

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