Search options for Number field treat it as a string, not a number

Michael Hendry hendry.michael at gmail.com
Fri May 10 03:55:59 EDT 2013


Dear All,

For consistency with TAS Books, the book-keeping software I used for many years before switching to Ubuntu and GnuCash, I allocate a unique transaction number to all manually-entered transactions, and file the paper documents that go with them in that order. (I mentioned this in the thread entitled "Generating a unique transaction number" in 2011).

Online purchases tend not to generate paper receipts, but to a cascade of e-mails (Order acknowledgement, despatch date, adjustment of consignment because one item isn't available, etc), so I tend to wait for the credit card statement to come in, and enter the transactions while reconciling, marking the transaction number on the statement. If I have any doubt about the transaction, I can go through the trail of e-mails to check it.

The result of this is that I can't just add 1 to the transaction number on the top of my pile of receipts to get a unique number for a new transaction in any of several different bank or credit card accounts.

I thought I should be able to use Edit=>Find and select Number >=117894 (for example)  to find out if the top receipt was the most recently numbered transaction, but the options are "contains", "matches regex" and "does not match regex".

I appreciate that the Number column is allowed to contain alphabetic as well as numeric characters (which annuls the value of the "+" key to get the next number in the sequence).

I've worked around the problem by using "Contains" 11789 (as in the above example), but this has obvious flaws.

Can anyone suggest a more reliable way of determining the highest number used in the Number field of any register?

Michael


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