Recategorizing / bulk acount changing

[David Carlson]

On 2/5/2014 9:03 PM, David T. wrote:
> You have read the documentation correctly, There really is no way to change most (but not all) transactions in an account register to a different destination. My experience is that this sort of need decreases as you get your books the way you actually need them.
>
> What I have done in this circumstance is:
> 1) open the account register from which I am moving some transactions in Auto Split mode, 
> 2) change the first target transaction to use the new account and copy the full new account info before leaving the field,
> 3) commit the transaction, which removes the transaction from this register, since it is no longer anchored to this account.
> 4) repeat 1-3 for every other transaction I wish to move, using Paste to enter the new destination account
>
> Before too long, you have worked through the complete register.
>
> HTH,
> David
>
>
> ________________________________
>  From: Elwood <elwoodblues at bellsouth.net>
> To: "gnucash-user at gnucash.org" <gnucash-user at gnucash.org> 
> Sent: Wednesday, February 5, 2014 6:42 PM
> Subject: Recategorizing / bulk acount changing
>  
>
> As I'm reading through the various sources of GnuCash documentation, and experimenting with various tasks in the user interface, it just struck me that there seems to be no easy way to move multiple transactions from one account to another.  (I read about how you can delete a parent account and have it absorb the child account transactions, but that's not always practical.)
>
> As someone trying to migrate away from Quicken, this strikes me as a big need.  It would be especially helpful for cleaning up the data imported from Quicken.  It also seems like it would be useful in general for the personal finance user (as opposed to the business accounting user) because they will naturally make a lot of mistakes in categorization/account setup, and will constantly be in the mode of improving and changing where expenses go.
>
> Am I missing something here?
>
>
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I use a procedure very similar to David's except that I try to work from
a different register view so that I can still see the transaction after
it is corrected. 

One way I do that is to create a search from the chart of accounts
screen that will collect transactions containing a certain text in the
description field, for example, so that changing the account will not
matter to the search.

David C