Sharing payees across accounts

[David Carlson]

On 2/1/2014 12:47 PM, AC wrote:
> 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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Perhaps you could try first opening the General Ledger view by clicking
Tools > General ledger.

Then click on View > Sort by > Description.  then scroll up or down to
see all the descriptions that you recently used.

If you find one that you want to re-use in a different account highlight
a transaction that has that description then click on Duplicate.  Once
the duplicated transaction has appeared, click on the account box that
you want to change and select a different account from the drop-down
list.  Then change the other information to represent your new
transaction and press Enter.

If you are looking for a description that you have not used recently go
the the Accounts window and use the search assistant.

There are other techniques that may work better in certain cases, but
these two are fairly general.

David C