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I often have to find transactions by account, e.g. I want to find when transactions for "Auto:Fuel" in my credit card account.

If I'm in my credit card register and do "Find Transaction", "Account", "matches any account", and select "Auto:Fuel" as the account, Search Results doesn't contain any transactions.

However, if I do Find specifying "All Accounts" it does find the transactions. I'm confused because the help page for Find says "The All Accounts option performs a search where accounts selected in the Choose Accounts dialog will only return results that match in both accounts" which sounds like it should be more selective than just specifying "Account". I want to understand what's going on so I will be able to do more complicated transaction finds.

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The Find operation using "All Accounts" worked because one account was specified explicitly ("Auto:Fuel") and another account ("Credit Card") was an implied limitation because you performed the Find operation from the Credit Card register. The "All Accounts" Find brought back the transactions that had split lines for both of those accounts.

If, instead, you had tried to find the same transactions but starting from the main Accounts window, you would have to specify both "Auto:Fuel" and "Credit Card" explicitly otherwise the Find operation would also have returned transactions for fuel purchases made with cash and CreditCard2.

The "Find Transaction", "Account", "matches any account" process requires two or more accounts to be selected explicitly (unless you're searching from the main Accounts window). And if you're searching from the register of a specific account, one of the explicitly selected accounts has to match the account register that you're currently in (otherwise it still won't return any matches). I'm not sure why the Account search requires two or more explicit accounts (rather than accepting an implied account) but it appears that's the way it was coded.

In any case, the "Account", "matches any account" Find process would not have been useful for your particular case, because it's an either/or search. Meaning, that if you specified "Auto:Fuel" and "Credit Card" as the accounts to be matched, it would return every single Credit Card transaction, not just the ones involving a fuel purchase.

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  • Thanks for the detailed explanation. I tried it out and it does seem to operate as you indicate. I reread the Help page and unfortunately there's no indication that more than one account needs to be selected. In my case being able to just specify one account would be incredibly useful, because it would give me all of my Auto:Fuel expenditures, regardless of how I paid (CC1, CC2, cash, etc)
    – DaveG
    Feb 19, 2022 at 14:33
  • In that case, you should initiate your search for "Auto:Fuel" expenditures from the main Accounts page. Searches from that page go across the entire transaction database, and are not limited to a subset defined by a particular account register.
    – Greg Schmidt
    Feb 19, 2022 at 14:57

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