[GNC] How to record payments for several items paid with a single transaction?

[Michael Hendry]

Hello again Chris.

Comments inserted below:

On 21 Jul 2023, at 09:09, Chris Green <cl at isbd.net> wrote:

> 
> I quite often seem to have cases where several 'items' (see below for
> the type of thing I mean) are paid for with a single payment to/from a
> bank account.  What is a good way to record this sort of thing?

I use separate accounts for recording cash and cheques received (Assets:Current Assets:Cash and Assets:Current Assets:Cheques). This allows for several different items to be recorded in the appropriate income accounts - with splits if (e.g.) a cheque is received for more than one income account.

Deposits are recorded as transfers from the …Cash and/or …Cheques account to the Current or Savings Account under a single paying-in slip number (a split transaction if both cash and cheques are paid in at the same time).

> 
> Examples:-
>  I pay in money (cash) from collections and other donations.  These
>  need to be recorded as separate items but end up as a single deposit
>  to the bank account.  At present I manage these by entering them
>  as separate transactions but with the same deposit slip number in
>  the 'Num' column in GnuCash.  Is there a better way?
> 
>  I pay money from (say) a savings account to a current account to
>  cover several payments (to one supplier) from the current account.
>  Similarly the payment from the current account may be a single
>  payment to cover several invoices. How should one record these? I
>  want to be able to see how the single payment is made up from
>  several items but also show that it was a single transaction.

I record transfers between the Savings and Current Accounts as simple transactions (i.e. two splits). If you need to specify the separate invoices and (possibly) separate expense accounts associated with them, you can do this with additional splits attached to the record of the online payment. I use the “share receipt” feature at the end of the transaction to get a printout which I can clip to invoices or statements or annotate by hand for audit purposes.

> 
> 
> There isn't a 'Num' to use in the second case above, this isn't a
> cheque payment, it's an online transaction so there's no (easy) way to
> identify it really. 
> 
> Would a split transaction work for this?  However I thought split
> transactions are for joining together payments to 'different' places
> rather than joining together several payments to and from the same
> places.

Happy to share some real-life examples (off-list), if you like.

Michael