What are charts & reports all about?

Charts and reports are where iBank really begins to demonstrate its value. After putting in the time and effort to set up your accounts, enter transactions, and categorize everything, you can use charts to make sense out of all that information quickly and easily. Charts are based on categories, so the key to generating effective charts is to assign appropriate categories to each of your transactions.

With very little setup, you can view breakdowns of your spending habits, track the changes in a particular expense from month to month, list all the transactions assigned to a particular category, and more. iBank also allows you to export data from Quick Summary and Custom charts for further analysis with other software, or for archival purposes.

Each chart you create is saved and displayed under the "Charts" item in the "Manage" section of the source list. Click the small disclosure triangle next to "Charts" to reveal your saved charts. Select one to view that chart in the right side of the main window. If you don't see the "Charts" item in your source list at all, you probably haven't created any charts yet!

charts in source list

To view a summary of your charts:

Click "Charts" in the source list. Summary information about all of your saved charts will be displayed to the right:

charts summary

About reports:

In iBank, it is important to understand the distinction between charts and reports. Charts are dynamic - each one has a number of options which you can configure and reconfigure on the fly to shape your analysis of the data in real-time. Reports are text documents based on standardized formats. Each type of chart in iBank has a particular standardized report associated with it; in order to generate a report, you must first create the appropriate chart.

Quick Summary and Custom charts can be used to produce standard Cash Flow Reports. As you might guess, Balance Sheet, Capital Gains, and ROI charts can produce standard reports according to their names. For more information about generating specific reports, refer to the section on the pertinent chart type.

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