Bill shared between business and personal accounts

[Derrick Ashby]

Hello list,

Running a home-based business as we do, there are a number of costs that 
are shared between the business and personal accounts - phone, 
electricity, water, gas, automobile, etc.  It is fairly simple to split 
these bills if they are entered directly, but I have just tried to do so 
through the business A/P functions, and have to report that this does 
not seem to work.  For example, the phone bill is split 75%/25% business 
and personal.  I created a vendor record for the phone company, and a 
bill.  Posted the bill into Accounts Payable. Processed the payment.  
The only place where you might be able to specify two expense accounts 
for a single bill is in the invoice itself, but (a) I recently 
discovered that multiple line invoices don't work because of the 
Accumulate Splits bug, and I don't want to update to 1.8.11 until gentoo 
has the upgrade at least in testing, and (b) I don't appear to be able 
to specify the correct account there anyway - the invoice item only 
accepts Assets, Liabilities and Expenses, and the way I normally handle 
the business paying for personal expenditure is via an Equity:Owner 
Drawing account.

The reason why I am trying to use A/P is that I normally pay bills via 
an online banking BPAY process that allows me to schedule the payment on 
the day that it is due, and I want to duplicate this in gnucash.  Is 
there a better way to do this?

Derrick