Cash flow and split transactions: bug or feature?

[papa.eric at free.fr]

Hi Gnucash helpers,

I just discovered a behaviour of cash-flow reports that worries me much (GC 2.2.9).

A simple example using a single transaction:

Create two bank accounts B1 and B2, and an expense account Cinema.
Enter a 30€ transaction, split as 10€ from B1, 20€ from B2.

The cash-flow report for B1 shows:
  30€ going to Cinema
  20€ coming from B2

The same report for B2 shows:
  30€ going to Cinema
  10€ coming from B2

Of course I would like to see only 10€ going to Cinema for B1, and 20€ for B2. For several reasons it seems incoherent (a bug then?) to do so:

1) it is shown as if B1 had paid for both and then B2 had reimbursed it. As if B2 was a friend's account. But had it been so, I would have entered the reimbused 20€ as coming back from Cinema. I don't represent friends by accounts!

Actually, B1 and B2 are sub-accounts from a single "true" bank account B, say B:B1 = budgeted for Daddy and B:B2 = budgeted for children. I enter a split transaction because I use B for reconciling, and I use B1 and B2 for budget.

2) If I had used two transactions instead of a split one, the result would have been what I want. I would expect the cash-flow to be independent on whether you paid using one or two checks (from the same "true" account!), because its goal is to show where you money goes, not the detail of how you paid it, isn'it?

3) When I used this cash-flow report, it was to help me devise a budget. Imagine I often use this pattern to pay with one check and split between sub-accounts representing budget targets. The result would be for B1:

30€ to Cinema
30€ to Theatre
150€ to Concert (5 times the same pattern)
140€ from B2

B2 would have the same expenses, and 70€ coming from B1.

Pretty useless if I want to devise a separate budget for B1 and B2 from these figures!

Of course I could unsplit the transaction after reconciling it (if I unsplit it before I could not find it when reconciling). But there are no tools to unsplit a transaction in two separate ones. And anyway, this is more complicated than getting the good report in the first place...

So I see as solutions:
- fill a bug report
- or try to program my own cash-flow version (ouch!)
- or unsplit by hand all such transactions (ouch!)

Or any other idea?

Thanks,
Eric