Sharing payees across accounts

AC gnucash at acarver.net
Sat Feb 1 13:47:07 EST 2014


On 2/1/2014 07:28, John Ralls wrote:
> 
> On Jan 31, 2014, at 10:09 PM, AC <gnucash at acarver.net> wrote:
> 
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> I'm slowly learning gnucash in an effort to switch over from MS Money
>> but I had a question about sharing payees.  Under MS Money, entering a
>> payee in one account (say Credit Card A) makes it available for auto
>> selecting in other accounts (such as Credit Card B).
>>
>> GNUCash doesn't seem to operate that way or I haven't figured out how to
>> make it do this.  Right now, if I enter a payee into Credit Card A, it
>> is not automatically available to Credit Card B as an auto populated
>> value.  If I use the two cards with the same payee, I must make sure I
>> enter the payee into each account separately and exactly the same way
>> (spaces, case, punctuation, etc.) so that reports will work.
> 
> The auto-complete in GnuCash is per account, and there is no "Payee" field; you're probably entering the payee in the Description field.
> 
> Reports don't use the Description field for any kind of sorting or matching, though. That's all done by account, and any transaction must involve at least two because unlike M$Money and Quicken GnuCash is a double-entry accounting program. Please study the Tutorial and Concepts Guide; you can read it online or download a PDF, ebook or mobi ebook at http://www.gnucash.org/docs.phtml.
> 

I did read through that several times even before downloading GnuCash
but I guess it didn't fully make sense.  The description may not be used
for sorting directly within GnuCash but I do use it when exporting data
and making other reports outside of the native program (I did the same
for Money and Quicken, made external reports).  It just wasn't clear
from my reading of the documentation that there is no shared description
list (or lack of a payee).

I'll keep trying it.  Right now I'm using both programs side by side
while I figure my way through GnuCash.  If it works it works and if not
I'll just have to find something that will run on the next version of
Windows (Money won't run even in XP compatibility mode).

Thanks for explaining it, though, it's a hard switch to make.


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