exported transactions: generate simple transactions -how ???

[Jannick Asmus]

Hi,

exporting the transactions seems to be an eternally recurring issue - 
especially if the tax accountant's software wants to be fed with last 
year's data entered in GnuCash. At the moment I am racking my brain how 
to organize the accounting data already extracted from GnuCash.

Now that there is a sql backend it is relatively easy to have a list of 
transaction splits which is - unfortunately - not yet the set of data 
the tax accountant expects. What his software wants are data sets of the 
format

date / amount / account1 / account 2 / number / text [1]

For a moment supposing a NON-split transaction (i.e. only TWO different 
accounts are involved in the transaction), what I have retrieved from 
the GnuCash xml format for this transaction are the two split 
transactions

guid / date / amount / account1 [2a]
guid / date / amount / account2 [2b]

Here my questions on this:

1 - How (sql or ...) can these two lines [2a] and [2b] be automatically 
grouped together to get an appropriate data set like [1]? Here the 
debit/credit logic should be consistently applied.

2 - What about split transactions, i.e. three or more accounts are 
involved in the transaction? They have to be boiled down to several data 
sets in format [1].

3 - What about transactions generated by the business feature 
(invoices)?

Any hints or codes solving this eternal problem are most welcome. My 
question is not about exporting the transactions out of GnuCash (with 
sql or the qif-trick or ...), this is about how to deal with the split 
transactions (like [2a] and [2b] and possibly [2c] etc.) to generate a 
consistent data basis to be fed into almost every other accounting 
software (see [1]).

Thx.

/J.