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

[Sergey Mende]

You better use splits for such cases. There is nothing wrong even when a 
few splits that goes to the same account: e.g. when you want for some 
reason (for convenience) keep an items of the same bill separately in 
your expenses account. Otherwise, when you would try to reconcile with, 
say, bank account statement, you will fail as bank has no idea how did 
you split your expense among different items and this expense appears as 
a single row for a total amount in a statement.

Sergey.

On 7/21/23 11:09, Chris Green 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?
>
> 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.
>
>
> 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.
>
>
> Any/all help would be very welcome.
>