How can I see splits relevant to an account, not just the parent transaction?

Question

I commonly group purchases or invoices into transactions and then show the individual components as splits in gnucash. I don't know if this is the right approach, but suppose I go shopping, I might do something like this:

Transaction: Shopping

• Split: Apples (Account: Fruit)
• Split: Nutella (Account: Confectionary)

Then when I go to the Confectionary account, it would be great to see how much I spent on Nutella, but instead all I see is a bunch of "Shopping" transactions (because I only see the description of the transaction in the ledger).

I see two workarounds, neither of which are very satisfying:

1. View -> Transaction Journal. This isn't great because now when I look at the ledger I see all shopping splits. I just want the split relevant to the account I'm looking at.
2. Split out into separate transactions. I can do this but it's a pain and I also like to attach invoices to my transactions. If I do this I'd have to attach the invoice to every split, which duplicates work and seems messy, not to mention incorrect from an accounting perspective (they weren't really separate transactions, where they?).

I'm after a technical solution here but also some guidance on how this kind of problem should be solved in gnucash as well as accounting more generally.

Note that a similar feature request was made 9 years ago. Given that this hasn't been resolved I assume there's some good workaround out there. I'd love to hear it!

Answer 1

1. Open Confectionary Account

2. Report->Account Report

3. Look for Nutella in the Memo Column

4. Copy and Paste to Excel

5. Filter on Memo Column if necessary

Answer 2

The amount of detail that you can get in your GnuCash reports depends partly on the amount of effort that you expend in detailed input.

For my own records, I have an expense account called Expenses:Groceries, and when I come home from the supermarket most (sometimes, all) of my spending gets recorded against that single category. It simplifies the input into GnuCash, but it does mean that I can't get any reports on my spending on Bananas, or Corn Flakes, or Toilet Paper.

If you want more detail to be available, you could create subcategories like

        Expenses:Confectionery:Chocolates
        Expenses:Confectionery:Lollies
        Expenses:Confectionery:Nutella

With more work when inputting your purchases, you will be able to get more detailed info out of the system.

Answer 3

I have the same request as quant. I use the Memo field for each split entry. The answer provided by base64 works and provides what I need, but requires a couple of steps, where, with an option, that same information could show up directly in the account register. Currently, all other split entries for this transaction also show up in the selected account register when using auto-split option in View.