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IMHO, this feature is a must, if GnuCash wants to stay at the forefront!
In case, I (and others) do not understand how to use GnuCash correctly, could someone (i.e. a GnuCash expert) advise how to solve relatively simple real word issues, please?
Lets say, I am an ordinary man who is organising event#1 and event#2. I made one purchase(transaction) and have one receipt, but this transaction includes multiple items (e.g. food and decorations) for both events. So the split transactions are set as transfers Assets:DebitCard1 -> Expenses:Food and Assets:DebitCard1 -> Expenses:Decorations. That keeps the books happy.
Now,
(i) I want to keep it a single transaction, then it will be the same amount as in my bank statement (so I can easily reconcile it).
(ii) I want to maintain tracking of how much money has been spend on food (i.e. Expenses:Food) and decorations (Expenses:Decorations)
(iii) At the end of the year, I will have made, lets say, 100 events, and I will want to know how much money (in percentage) I have spend on food, petrol etc for each event individually (I do not want to put a tremendous amount of effort into this; otherwise I could well use an excel spreadsheet or write my own code in python, but I don't think it's wise to re-invent a wheel..).
(iv) Using thousands of accounts (i.e from Expenses:Food:event#1 to Expenses:Food:event#99, and from Expenses:Decorations:event#1 to Expenses:Decorations:event#99) is not really an option, is it?? nor would be an option to use a reversed system (i.e. Event#1:food to Event#99:food etc.), as it would require to consistently create the same eventNames/ProjectNames or the same expense accounts (i.e. Expenses:Food, Expenses:Decorations etc)
(v) Using Vendors and Customers do not seem to allow to assignt fraction of split transactions (i.e. a fraction of items on a single receipt) to different customers/vendors (e.g. event#1, event#2) while retaining expense type (e.g. Expenses:food, Epxenses:transport)
(vi) I could have separate receipts for each event, but there are various benefits for purchasing multiple items at once rather than separately, for example, shipping costs.
(vii) Now, of course, event#1 could actually refer to fixing a car, while event#2 could refer to Holiday2017, and event#3 could be someones birthday etc.
Lack of this option is frustrating me so much, that I would happily move to another software, but I haven't found a free alternative yet.. Could someone recommend one, please ? (I've tried HomeBanks and KMyMoney - none of them really solves the problem!)
Personally, I very much support explanations (why such classification is needed) by the following users (and I would like to hear a robust solution/work around that addresses the issues they have raised):
Craig Lawson (Craig Lawson 2003-05-26 22:16:58 UTC)
Hajo,
Vincent Dawans (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=113772#c6),
Kael Shipman (commented · March 30, 2016 22:20),
Jeff Wiegley (https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2007-July/020873.html)
Are we (those who strive for the orthogonal dimensions) misunderstanding something, or is this feature really so difficult to implement??
I mean Craig Lawson raised this in 2003-05, that's 14 years ago! I don't think smartphones existed then, but now we have self driving cars.. :/