Difficulty reporting split transactions filtered by description?

[R. Victor Klassen]

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.


On Jan 28, 2016, at 6:56 AM, Greg Skelhorn <gskelhorn at eastlink.ca> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I would like to make a report showing a total of one part of a split transaction. I am new to Gnucash and may be missing something obvious. I am working with payroll transactions and want to make a report per employee.
> 
> I enter the transactions as a split in the checking account. The split involves four expense accounts and seven liabilities plus the checking account. The employee name is in the transaction description and each split have the employee name and pay period in the memo field.
> 
> Can I make a report that produces a summary total for each part of the payroll split transactions per employee? I think if I could have the Cash Flow report run over only the transactions for a single employee I would have it. I see how to filter for a period but no way to filter by description.
> 
> I've tried using Edit | Find for filter based on employee name and account expense:wages then filter by date. This shows the transactions I would like to report on.
>  
> For example, to generate a total gross wages report I tried using Edit | Find to filter transactions using Description contains employee name and accounts set to expenses:wages but the search results includes all parts of the split. 
> 
> I have the feeling I'm missing something obvious.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Greg
> 
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