GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 131273
Include split description in transaction description
Last modified: 2018-06-29 20:40:17 UTC
I like to use transactions with more than two splits, for example when buying a book and a CD in the same shop, I'd have one split for the cash deduction, one increasing the book asset account, and one increasing the CD assets. I'd also put the title of the CD in the description of its split, and the book title in its corresponding description. The whole transaction gets the name of the shop or something similar as the description. When viewing the above example in a single-line (basic ledger mode), I only see the transaction description. But looking at the book assets, I'd rather have it mention the book title; and in the CD assets (of course!) the CD title. So I propose the following logic: the description shown in single-line view is actually the transaction description PLUS the relevant split (with, e.g., a colon between them). If one of these descriptions is empty, we just show the other (drop the colon, then). The "composite description" is not directly editable for multi-transations in single-line mode, you have to view all the splits to do that (just like for the accounts). This even works for the case where the same transaction has multiple splits going to the same account (think: two books bought via one transaction), which looks just confusing at the moment.
Interesting suggestion. A couple issues: a) people like to be able to edit the transaction description without expanding the transaction's splits b) If you let them edit it anyway, there would be an undesirable inconsistency between what you enter in the field and what the field shows. So, are there any ideas for implementing this in a way that doesn't lose the ability to edit the transaction description of an unexpanded transaction?
Thank you for taking the time to explain your enhancement request. The described enhancement is a good proposal and would be an advantage for the software. However, as a volunteer-driven project with limited resources, the GnuCash developers have to set priorities on which features are most likely being worked on in the near future. In that sense, the current GnuCash developers decided not to work on your proposed feature in the next 4-6 months. In case you would like to have this feature implemented in any case, you have the following option: 1. Start to program in gnucash yourself - see http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Development . 2. Convince someone who is not yet part of the GnuCash team to join the team and implement your feature. 3. Pay some of the GnuCash developers to implement your feature - ask on the mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org in that case. Thank you very much. Feel free to file other bugs or enhancement requests that you find, though.
GnuCash bug tracking has moved to a new Bugzilla host. This bug has been copied to https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=131273. Please update any external references or bookmarks.