Categorisation of transactions

[David Ryder]

On Thu, 2009-03-05 at 08:02 -0800, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> 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. 
> 
"though it has been talked about several times"
Please, please don't go down that path ... I, for one, like gnucash
because it doesn't and that is why I understand it. I never grasped the
other methods and nearly went crazy.

David :-(


> > 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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