[GNC] Unusual book need

[john]

There's an easier way:

First use the Find dialog to select all of the transactions in question into a journal. Create a temporary account for them, then change the account for all of them to the temporary account. That's the only step that requires one-by-one editing, but if you're clever with the account name so that it's adjacent to the original one in the list then it's only 3 clicks per transaction. 

Next select File>Export>Export Transactions as CSV. If these are two-split transactions with no notes or memos then you can select "simple format" on the first page. Also select "Use quotes" there to protect any oddities in descriptions. Proceed with the export. Open the resulting CSV in a spreadsheet program and use Find-Replace to adjust the account names to match the other book.

In GnuCash save the file and open the other one. You might want to disable auto-save (save to XML first if you're on a SQL backend) so that you can easily discard the import if it needs tweaking. Import the transactions from CSV and check the results to make sure you got what you want. Once you're happy save the results and switch back to Grandpa's book.

Make sure the Find register and if you opened one the temporary account register from the first step are closed. Select the temporary account in the Accounts page and click the Delete button on the toolbar. In the middle of the dialog select "Delete all Transactions" and click "Delete".

Regards,
John Ralls


> On Apr 15, 2022, at 8:43 AM, David T. via gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org> wrote:
> 
> Jean,
> 
> Your assessment is about right, although I wouldn't characterize it as a shortcoming, just an area that requires manual intervention. 
> 
> Jeff, 
> 
> While it may seem onerous to consider, it turns out that creating and deleting transactions is not that great an effort, given auto completion. If you open both sets of books and display them side by side, you can quickly work through your dad's file and add the transactions to your books. 
> 
> Once you are satisfied with the accuracy of the new transactions, you can delete them from your dad's books. Turning off the delete transaction confirmation for the session can speed that up significantly. 
> 
> It's possible to make, move, and delete hundreds of transactions in a short period of time. (This fact, coupled with the relative infrequency of needing to do this and the programming overhead involved is the reason why nobody has developed a tool for this.) 
> 
> David T.
> 
> On April 15, 2022 3:20:27 AM PDT, Jean Laroche <ripngo at gmail.com> wrote:
>> As far as I know, there's no easy way to delete a group of transactions, 
>> I think that's one of the shortcomings of GC?
>> You can do a search to find all of them using the right criterion but 
>> I'm pretty sure after that you can't really do much with that (except 
>> create a report which isn't useful for you).
>> 
>> But maybe the experts know of a way.
>> 
>> One useful feature would be the ability to delete/move transactions in a 
>> search result, since GC does not allow selecting multiple transactions 
>> and acting on them (to move them to a new account / delete them etc) 
>> doing it on the result of a search could be a useful workaround.
>> 
>> J
>> 
>> 
>> On 4/15/22 11:00 AM, Jeff wrote:
>>> I need to move transactions from from one set of books to another one.
>>> 
>>> I didn't realize while entering transactions in my dads books that 
>>> they should have gone into mine.  My dad opened a bank account that I 
>>> did not know about until I started entering charges that my son made 
>>> with feed stores (debit card).  I had not been informed about the bank 
>>> account that grandpa opened in my sons name, and I am responsible for 
>>> all of his income/debits until he is 21.  And many of these 
>>> transactions affect my income/loss.
>>> 
>>> Is there an easy way to move those entries from one journal to the 
>>> other or will I have to find all of them and manually delete them from 
>>> one journal and reenter them in mine?  These are separate journal files.
>>> 
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