Possible Bug in Date Selection.

[aviator]

Hi Mark,

I think I've discovered a bug in FM's date handling routine.

This morning, 2/1/2014, I ran a Distribution Summary report for last months distributions.

When I select the report for the first time after opening FM, the date settings default to "Earliest price to date". This is expected and normal behavior.

However, when I select "Last Month", something weird happens. As today is 2/1/14, Last Month should populate the the start and end dates with 1/1/2014 and 1/31/2014, respectively. It doesn't. Instead it populates the month *before* the month before, which in this case is 12/1/2013 to 12/31/2013. The populated dates are obviously not "Last Month".

I've noticed this problem before and it, I believe, only happens on the first of the month. I've attached a screenshot taken this morning that illustrates the problem.

Thanks.

PossibleDateBug.PNG (16.83 KiB) Viewed 1659 times

[Mark]

Hi aviator,

Thanks for the report. It is not a bug, as it is working as documented. However, I would agree that maybe it should be changed, as it isn't intuitive. If you open up the Report Settings dialog, and press "Help", you'll see the definition of each pre-defined date range setting. In the case of "Last Month" it is defined as:

"last complete calendar month prior to default ending date"

The "default ending date" is the date of your last recorded price on or before the current date. Since Feb 1 is a weekend, you won't have prices for today, so your default ending date is going to be Jan 31. All of the pre-defined date ranges are relative to this default ending date. Maybe it would be more intuitive for the "Last XXX" pre-defines to use the current date instead. We'll see about making this change.

[aviator]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the informative reply. Your explanation makes sense and there may be users that need it that way.

I still use Quicken for my retail banking and credit card transactions (but no longer use it for investment tracking because it's abysmal) and took a look at how Intuit handled report dates. Their "last month" is last month, in this case 1/1/2014 to 1/31/2014. (I realize that comparing Fund Manager to Quicken is like comparing a Ferrari to donkey... but I was curious how they handled it.)

Thanks.

[Mark]

Hi aviator,

Thanks for the information, that is useful. I do agree it is more intuitive to work that way.