[GNC] split transaction description field length limit

[Adrien Monteleone]

You could employ custom 'tags' for each property either in the Notes, 
Action, Num, Memo, or Description fields, whatever works best for you. 
Then when you run a Transaction Report, you can filter the results that 
match your tag.

The only downside to this method, at this time, over setting up separate 
accounts for each property, are that the Income Statement doesn't filter 
by custom text, so if you use a tagging system, you'd have to construct 
that report out of two or more Transaction Reports.

Since it seems you aren't so much reaching a character limit as seeing a 
practical truncation on a printed report, maybe just change your wording 
in the Memos? Perhaps start with "Property 1-..." That way you see this 
info up front. You can also use the NUM or Action fields for that text, 
but of these I think only NUM can show up on reports. (and you may be 
using that for something else)

----
Yes, Bills (and Invoices) can have their line items assigned to various 
expense (or Income) accounts.

That detail is by default, only visible when viewing the bill/invoice.

If you want to be able to craft reports based on that info, you'll need 
to un-set Preferences > Business > General > Accumulate splits on post, 
which will then preserve each line item as visible in the affected 
account registers. (this can also be toggled per bill/invoice on 
posting) A Transaction Report can then 'see' those line items as 
individual splits in the bill/invoice transaction.

Also, if you use bills/invoices, you have the option of setting a 
separate 'Description' in the posting Dialog. While I don't know of a 
way to do any reporting on this field specifically, that info does show 
up in a Vendor/Customer report and in the Notes field of the posted 
transaction. (so presumably, a filter on that field might work)

Regards,
Adrien

On 3/4/24 11:46 AM, Tim via gnucash-user wrote:
> I don't think I framed the problem completely. I have several rental properties and before I migrated to GNU cash I was using Quicken to generate “itemized spending” reports from which I could fill out schedule E for each property. When I tried to do the same thing with GNU cash for the transactions associated with, for example maintenance on property 1 or repairs on property 2 I did get a list of transactions but the descriptions of them were so truncated that it wasn't practical for me to verify the correctness of them the way I used to be able to do by just looking down the column of transactions.
> 
> If I were to pervert the gnucash vendor bill payment system to detail the work my part-time employees do, would I be able to assign line items on an invoice to different GNU cash expense accounts associated with the different properties people worked on? And would reports generated by GNU cash be able to list the detail for the line items? That's my ultimate goal. I want to be able to generate reports from the gnucash for each calendar year, which also happens to be my tax year, so I can use that information to fill out schedule E for each rental property. I'm comfortable with doing that manually but I have been spoiled by having reports from Quicken that provide the detail associated with each expense account in a form that's easy to double check.