Difficulty reporting split transactions filtered by description?

[Wm...]

Fri, 29 Jan 2016 11:27:20
<66272C1E-B4E0-4780-BD7B-77DCC7FA265B at gmail.com>
R. Victor Klassen <rvklassen at gmail.com> wrote...

>Here is what I wound up doing to solve the same problem:
>
>All of my payroll entries have splits like:
>
>Gross pay                                      Expenses:Payroll:Wages   <amount G>
>Employer Contribution to WSIB  Expenses:Payroll:WSIB   <amount W>
>Employer Contribution to EI            Expenses:Payroll:EI     <amount E>
>Employer Contribution to CPP   Expenses:Payroll:CPP    <amount C>
>Income tax                                     Liabilities:Accounts Payable:Tax Withheld <amount T>
>WSIB Premium                           Liabilities:Accounts Payable:WSIB <amount W>
>Total Contribution to EI                       Liabilities:Accounts Payable:EI <amount E * 2.4>
>Total Contribution to CPP              Liabilities:Accounts Payable:CPP <amount C * 2>
>Net Pay                                                Assets:Current
>Assets:Chequing Account <the amount that balances the above>
>
>… with the amounts in the appropriate columns as make sense.
>
>Time to make T4s, I created a transaction report, restricted to dates
>within 2015, and including all the accounts listed above.
>At that point I’ve got as much help from GNUCash as I can (without
>learning Scheme).   So I copy the report into a spreadsheet,
>save as CSV, go into an editor to remove the C$ at the front of every
>number, save back to CSV, and pull into OpenOffice (Excel would work
>too).
>
>Now I have a table with all the information, I need to use the
>spreadsheet sort and subtotal functions to get the information by
>employee.
>
>I also have the extra complication of some of my employees got part of
>their compensation in kind, rather than cash, which affects their
>pensionable income for CPP purposes, so I need to track that down, too.
>But you get the idea.

Are you using the General / Multi-line option of the Transaction Report?

If not it might help you and / or Greg to try this recipe:

Transaction Report
Accounts: select just one account, e.g. Bank
Display: tick / check
   Account name
   Other account name
   Amount: double
   Sign reverse: none
General
   Start and End date = date of payment
   Style: Multi-line

play with the other options as fits your need

-- 
Wm...