How to track expenses from an account in gnucash?

Question

I can't figure out how to select three assets (cash + two bank accounts) and a bunch of expenses, and get a report on how much has been spent from those accounts on those expenses.

• Cash Flow won't do, it includes money moved around between accounts and won't let me chose which expenses to include
• Expense barchart won't do, it won't let me chose which accounts the money should come from (it's just a total)
• Same thing with Expense piechart
• Income statement won't do, it deals with income instead of assets

I just want to know how much I've spent (in contrast to total spent which would include my wife's spending as well) on these specific expenses during the last month. Shouldn't that be doable?

Answer 1

What you're looking for is the 'Transaction Report'.

When you're looking at the report (it comes up empty), open the options and click on the first tab 'Accounts'. Here you can highlight multiple source accounts in the top pane, and filter by the Expense accounts that you are interested in the bottom pane.

Here's an example that goes over the process (there are many examples online, I just included the first one that came up in a search).

Answer 2

I found your post while searching for this same exact problem. Found the answer on a different forum about a different topic, but what you want is a Cash Flow report.

Go to Reports>Income & Expenses>Cash Flow - then in Options, select the asset accounts you'd like to run the report for ("Calle's Checking" or whatever) and the time period. It will show you a list of all the accounts (expense and others) with transactions effecting that asset. You can probably refine this further to show only expenses, but I found it useful to have all of it listed.

Not the prettiest report, but it'll get your there.