New account type

[Sam Liddicott]

Background:

My wife uses gnu-cash but is really frustrated because she has to switch to
various accounts to enter expenses.

She wants one screen from which to do this. The ^T transfer is not idea for
multiple entry, and type-searching on the account selector only matches at
the start of the word so a unique portion of the account name can't be used
as a quick match.

The closest I could get to what she actually wanted was to create a
general-ledger account where she has to enter two rows per income or
expense.

On one row she records the expense name, the source of the money and
amount. This creates a corresponding entry in the bank account or credit
card with the transfer column set to "General-Ledger"
On the next row she records the expense category and same amount which
becomes an entry in that expense account with the transfer column also set
to "General-Ledger". Setting the transfer columns in each account to
"General ledger" is loss of information on those views.

Proposal:

What she would prefer is for the general ledger two have two transfer
columns and a single amount column (and no balance - which would be zero).

Then she doesn't have to enter the same expense on 2 rows, it just becomes
a transfer account with two transfers on 1 row.

And then in the corresponding source/dest accounts of the transfer, rather
than just list "General-Ledger" in the transfer column it should take the
entry from the General-Ledger transfer column and become
"General-Ledger(Expenses::Entertainment::Food)" and
"General-Ledger(Liabilities::Credit-Card)"

Of course there could be more than one general ledger account, maybe they
could be named after who did the spending

Such an account type with it's slightly different view would add
convenience as well as a new level of meta-data (person or purpose of
spending) as well as source of money and category of spending currently
employed.


I realise that if this is not possible in a simple way, that discussion
should move over to the -dev list.

Sam