[Bug]: Reports do not consider future dated transactions when claiming to use the range 'All time'

[mullermn]

Verified issue does not already exist?

• I have searched and found no existing issue

What happened?

The reports feature has several date filtering options, once of which is 'Live'/'All time'.

From its name this should show all transactions that Actual is aware of, but as currently implemented it only shows historical transactions, not future dated ones that may be there for planning.

How can we reproduce the issue?

Create some future dated transactions and experiment in the report builder.

As a side note, though this is potentially more of an enhancement, the date selectors for static dates should enable the selection of the most future dated transaction in Actual (for the same reason that I've raised this bug), but currently they're capped at the current date

Where are you hosting Actual?

Pikapods

What browsers are you seeing the problem on?

Desktop App (Electron)

Operating System

Mac OSX

[pwinnski]

This seems to be a philosophical issue. Actual is budgeting software, not planning software. Transactions with future dates aren't valid because they haven't happened. They're not Actual!

These assumptions, this philosophy, is very deeply embedded into the software, and I suspect that the date picker and "All time" are just the tip of the iceberg.

[mullermn]

Discussion on philosophy should probably happen elsewhere, but as far as relevance to this bug report goes, I'll just point out that if that IS the philosophy then there are numerous places where it's not being applied already:

• You can enter future dated transactions
• You can have uncleared transactions imported from banks (until they clear they haven't happened)
• The whole concept of scheduled transactions relates to things that haven't happened yet, and Actual supports those
• You can set budgets for the future
• The whole concept of budgeting relates to future planning - dealing purely with things that have happened already would just be accounting. Removing future dated transactions from this planning just creates a voluntary blind spot in that planning.

but smallest in scope and most tangible for this bug report:

• If that is the case then the label for this drop down is wrong - it's not 'All time' it's 'To date', or perhaps 'Cleared'.

[pwinnski]

👍 on the label being unclear.

👎 on your other points. Uncleared transactions are still Actual transactions, and not future-dated. Scheduled transactions are not Actual transactions until posted. Budgeting, or assigning income to categories, is categorizing Actual income received in a transaction, not a transaction itself.

IMO, AB stands in a line of software that has historically eschewed the kind of planning you're talking about, focusing on Actual expenses (or "True Expenses"). You're welcome to view things however you wish, but you might end up hitting limitations more often than not with entering transactions that haven't actually happened yet. 🤷