CreateSpace / Royalties / Automatic Splitting?

[Derek Atkins]

greyproc <greyproc at gmail.com> writes:

>> If your question is: Given a transaction that says to credit my checking
>> account $100, can I split that $100 into, e.g., $50 to
>> Expenses:Groceries and $50 to Expenses:Home Goods, the answer is no, you
>
> Yes, that's exactly what I meant (except, of course, splitting to an author
> and an illustrator).
>
>
>> cannot do that automatically, and OFX does not support Split
>> Transactions.  The only import technology that supports that would be
>> QIF, but you would need to form the QIF file itself to declare the
>> transaction as a split transaction.  GnuCash cannot auto-split a
>> transaction.
>
> Thank you for the answer. 
>
> I was hoping that GnuCash could 'learn' the split transactions the same way
> it learns the top level ones (ie, the way the csv import is able to
> 'remember' what I did for a similar transaction --- an awesome feature which
> is really working well for me).   

Nope.  Gnucash only learns how to map the transactions as they are
imported.  It can learn how to assign the 'near' and 'far' accounts
based on the imported data, but cannot "split" it unless the import says
it is a split transaction.  And the only import format that can say that
is QIF.

> Every item of deposit (each book sold) is split into smaller payments
> (royalties), and I had wanted to show this as a split on each transaction.
> (ie $100 comes in (Asset:Bank), showing 10 transactions of $10, and for
> each, $4.50 goes to author (Liabilities:Royalties:Author), $4.50 to
> illustrator (Liabilities:Royalties:Illustrator), and $1 to company
> (Equity:Revenue)...) 

Instead of CSV or OFX you can write QIF to specify this.

> Of course, now, it seems I'm being overly pedantic, and the right way (or,
> at least, the way I'm going to do it) is to just do one transaction at the
> end of each quarter, to disburse the money appropriately to the 3 accounts
> (from Equity:Revenue:Book_Sales).

There is that, too :)

> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
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-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available