A simple balance report. It has:

1. a list of items, one per account, each containing:

• the full account name
• the Ledger-style elided short account name (the leaf account name, prefixed by any boring parents immediately above); or with --flat, the full account name again
• the number of indentation steps for rendering a Ledger-style account tree, taking into account elided boring parents, --no-elide and --flat
• an amount

1. the total of all amounts

Enabling this makes balance --flat --empty also show parent accounts without postings, in addition to those with postings and a zero balance. Disabling it shows only the latter. No longer supported, but leave this here for a bit. flatShowsPostinglessAccounts = True

Generate a simple balance report, containing the matched accounts and their balances (change of balance) during the specified period. This is like PeriodChangeReport with a single column (but more mature, eg this can do hierarchical display).

When true (the default), this makes balance --flat reports and their implementation clearer. Single/multi-col balance reports currently aren't all correct if this is false.

A sorting helper: sort a list of things (eg report rows) keyed by account name to match the provided ordering of those same account names.