[GNC] Filtering reports on contents of Memo field

[Michael Hendry]

Our Rotary Club hasn’t been able to meet in the flesh since the beginning of Covid, and we haven’t been able to run any fundraisers.

One of our members suggested that each of us might consider donating the cost of the meal (and the associated glass or two of wine|) to the club’s charity account as a way of keeping some money coming in. As this is entirely voluntary and comparisons would be invidious if issued in reports, I’ve recorded the chosen a chosen destination in the description field of each transaction, and recorded the donor's name in the Memo. This way I can simply exclude Memo from reports.

I’m now looking at making a Gift Aid claim for all these donations at the end of March, and I’ve found that the Spreadsheet I created to keep track of the Gift Aid side of the accounts has got out of step with the Gnucash record.

I’ve managed to reconcile these by opening the account which receives these donations, filtering by date, using Find to pick up one member at a time in this account in the Memo and Reporting the findings (which provides a total in addition to the individual donations).

This is a tedious and error-prone procedure which I would like to be able to automate.

As far as I can see, there isn’t a way of setting up multiple such reports in advance and running it at the end of the tax year (or indeed as an ad-hoc report during the year) to get it all done in one go, and I’d have to export the account to CSV and sort by Memo to separate the donations by member, and then extract the total-contributions-by-member to generate the Gift Aid Claim.

That’s unless one of you wise ones can suggest another route…

Perhaps more in hope than expectation,

Michael