Sometimes not all the entries follow the rules or you don’t want all the entries be be calculated, so using action buttons will be better. You can decide when you want this entry to be calculate.
You can configure that action buttons can only be executed after approval, but the formula will
be executed when you’re typing entries.
You can add some advanced setting such as create a new subtable record, recalculating the entry…etc. in your action button which makes your button more powerful.
There is another way of doing running balances with some conditioning. By using SUMIF formula to sum the quantitties only when the field “status” is “complete”. Like the template PSI lite.
But you are right, there is a whole world to explore with action buttons. With code it should be faster to calculate the balance when the database gets big as it won’t have to recalculate all the transactions in the history. Instead by just taking the current balance and adding the amount of the new transaction it is done.
Then you could copy and paste the reports to other spreadsheet and go to the next step.
If you would like to turn the data into the second pic you attached directly on Ragic, it might need custom scripting to bring out the report.