account transaction reports

[Greg Woods]

Mike Sabin wrote:

>  I looked on both binary cd's for Guppi, and did
> not find it


I've run into this before. Guppi is spelled with a capital G, so if you 
go looking for "guppi", you won't find it.



> In gnucash 1.4, I used the Transaction Report to answer the type of
> questions you are talking about.  After playing with 1.6 for a little
> while, it seems that the profit and loss reports are so improved,
> that I will be using them, instead.  Do they do what you want? 


Not quite. This gives a very nice report of *total* expenses, but what I 
want is a report of expenses charged to a particular credit card. Maybe 
I'm just missing something, but I don't see any way to do this with the 
Profit and Loss reports. I'm fairly sure that what I need is the 
filtered transaction report, that is, show me all my expenses, but 
filter it and show only those that are also part of the Visa card 
account. Logically, I want an "AND" operation. The default reports let 
you do things like

account 'A' OR account 'B' OR account 'C' ....

by just selecting the expense accounts you want. The default is to 
select all of your expense and income accounts.

What I need is:


(account 'A' OR account 'B' OR account 'C' ....) AND account 'Visa'

Theoretically, the filtered transaction reports let me do this (and by 
the way, this is really cool because this is something even Quicken 
can't do). The problem is that it counts "split transactions" as an 
account of its own. In this day and age of "super stores" that carry a 
wide variety of items, it is quite common for credit card transactions 
to be split across multiple expense accounts. As a result, about 30% of 
the total credit card expenses show up as "split transaction" in a 
filtered report. This makes the report useless. What needs to happen is 
that when the filtering code comes across a split transaction, it needs 
to break it down into the individual splits, and add *those* to the 
total for the proper expense account. I can see how this would work in 
my head, a great application for recursion.  If it were perl, C, or 
Python, I'd probably try to do the coding myself, but I don't know 
SCHEME and I don't have time to learn a new programming language right now.

--Greg


> 
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