Bug: Spending report is malformed

Rocket J Squirrel

The built-in Spending by Category report is showing malformed output in QWin R52.28. This is not a new problem but it seems to be getting worse.

Here is my top-level Taxes category and all its subcategories:

But when I run the Spending by Category report, the nesting of subcategories is all wrong. Some of the subcats appear to be top-level cats. And some subsubcats appear as subcats. E.g., Taxes:FIT:Estimated is correct, but Estimated is showing at the same level as FIT.

I use Taxes:FIT for Federal Income Tax and yet there are two separate lines, one showing as a subsubcat Taxes:Other Taxes:FIT. How can this be? My data file supervalidates cleanly.

Is anyone else seeing this issue? Know of a fix? Redoing my Categories list (bleah)?

Chris_QPW

Well, I don't have any three level categories in taxes, but I do have one in medical, and it is showing up correctly.

Rocket J Squirrel

That doesn't look right to me, @Chris_QPW . The Other Medical:Dentist subsubcat can't be right.

Chris_QPW

If is correct, but looked strange to me too, until I looked it up. If you have subcategories, but still put the transaction in the parent category you are using "Other".

It made me realize that I had in fact miscategorized those transactions, since normally if I have sub-categories I don't use the parent category. Here is it fixed:

Rocket J Squirrel

The "Other" thing is not the tree I'm barking up. But let me show you how this report is screwing up. When I drill down on either of my 2 transactions with "FIT" in the category, I get this:

The categories are identical in the register. But the report shows this.

I don't believe this can be explained away. It's a bug.

But what I really care about is the bad nesting of subcategories. Spending by Category is the simplest report to see a year's worth of spending. And it's broken.

Chris_QPW

The more I think about it, you're right, it is a bug. But like you said the nesting problem is an even bigger problem.

Rocket J Squirrel

I manually created a whole new hierarchy of categories "XTaxes" mimicking my Taxes category tree, and moved all affected transactions to the new hierarchy. I hoped this would create new data in the database and the report would become correct. Nope. The report still fails to display the hierarchy with proper nesting and subtotaling. What an odd bug.