Reports/Budgets with multiple time periods?

[Mike or Penny Novack]

>   Hi Derek,
>   Yes it's possible to go into the report options and choose a period,
>   but it's only a single period.
>   I would like to be able to compare (for example) the income, expenses
>   and balance of my check account for say the past six months, with
>   estimates for the following six months as well. Essentially I'm trying
>   to achieve something similar to what the budgets seem to supposed to be
>   doing. Here is an example from my spreadsheet to illustrate (my
>   apologies to list members, the ASCII list version is likely to be a bit
>   of a mess):
>  
>
Derek, I know exactly what Matt wants because it is very similar to what 
"we" need in terms of the standard way that "non-profits" report (side 
by side presentation of say the balance sheets for two dates along with 
the revenues/expenditures report (income/expense report) for the 
interval. I have put onto the low priority burner creating custom 
reports for this (sorry). The reason is that for proper GAAP reporting 
we need to also be able to ANNOTATE the reports and so are creating the 
reports "manually" (using the reports that GnuCash can easily produce as 
it stands). In other words, we would need an "application"  (one that 
read a GnuCash "books" file and produced the report giving the person 
using this a chance to add notes) as opposed to just a "report" within 
Gnucash -- and while writing such a thing "my line of country" it isn't 
worth the effort compared to the once a year chore of doing it manually 
combining the data from two Gnucash balance sheets and one 
income/expense report with the person doing that sticking in the "notes" 
as they went.

But of course if I get bored enough I might do it.

Michael