Categorisation of transactions

Andrew Sackville-West andrew at swclan.homelinux.org
Thu Mar 5 11:02:50 EST 2009


On Wed, Mar 04, 2009 at 07:47:29PM +0100, Zdenek Muzik wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I am looking for a way to categorise transactions in GNUCash and cannot 
> find anything on the topic in the documentation.

I think you are looking for the equivalent of what Quicken calls
"classes". Arbitrary tags attached to txns that are completely
independent of the chart of accounts. No such feature exists in
gnucash, though it has been talked about several times. 

> I am basically looking for a possibility to assign attributes to 
> transactions that could be used in searches and reporting.
> Examples of such attributes would be Payee, Project, etc. Ideally there 
> would be an editable list for each attribute so that it would be 
> possible to use a drop-down list while entering the transaction.
> The only way there seems to exist is splitting accounts into 
> sub-accounts which is extremely unpractical for certain use cases - e.g. 
> attributes that may be used across a big number of accounts, temporary 
> attributes (e.g. projects) etc. I think that about three-four fields 
> like that would be enough.

YOu can get something like this functionality by using the memo fields
and sophisticated use of Edit->Find. The find results will be in a
"register" display and you can run Report->Account Report to get a
pretty rudimentary report (with totals at least) for what is in the
Find result. The key to this solution would be to use consistent memos
in your txns and add enough attributes to the Find to filter
the txns the way you like.

The next best thing would be to provide the ability to match on
arbitrary strings in the regular reports -- essentially allow
something like the Find behavior in the regular reports. That would
extend the above solution to a more general case without having to
completely tear into the guts of gnucash. But I don't see anyone with
the time to do that kind of report writing at the moment. you are
welcome to do so, if able. 

hth

A
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