Adding a 'number' field to splits

John Ralls jralls at ceridwen.us
Sat Sep 17 19:43:28 EDT 2011


On Sep 16, 2011, at 1:36 PM, Alex Aycinena wrote:

> 
> Suppose you buy a car using a check from one account as part of your
> down payment, a check from a second account as the rest of the down
> payment, you take out a loan for the remainder, and you pay some car
> registration expenses. Today you have to artificially break this down
> into two transactions so that each one has a check number and you
> spread the other parts of the transaction across the two. With the new
> field you would put the first check number with the first split, the
> second with the second, perhaps a loan number with the third, an asset
> number for the fourth (the car), and leave the field blank for the
> expense, depending on your personal work practices. If you want to see
> the check number(s) from the expense register, you simply look at the
> numbers on the splits and see two check numbers in this case. You can
> use the transaction-level number for something else or leave it blank.
> 
> Granted that with your run-of-the-mill two line entry (dr. expense,
> cr. checking), the current system is just fine. This just provides
> more flexibility.

There are already two fields in Splits which are available for random use: Action and Memo. You could set up your report so that if the Transaction's Num field is blank but the Split's Action field isn't and has a numeric value, the latter is displayed.

Doing something like that in the Register is perilous, though -- regardless of whether you make a new field in the split record or not. The problem is that when viewed in unsplit mode, the user won't know whether the number in the Num column came from the transaction or the split -- and if she edits it, the program won't know whether it should edit the split value or insert the number (though I suppose you could force a split view in that case to make it obvious).

Regards,
John Ralls




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