Sharing payees across accounts

[AC]

On 2/1/2014 11:44, David Carlson wrote:
> 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.

> 
> 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.


That seems to work reasonably well, especially helpful for the less
frequent names that don't get used often, are long, and I forget if I
abbreviated it or not.  Took two tries to make it work.  First attempt
resulted in a hard crash, not sure what happened.  Second time it worked
fine.