Comment 2 for bug 140504

Thought I should describe my work around. Its not perfect - in fact far from it! But I needed to split transactions attached to my salary - I wanted to record my gross salary and then deductions like tax and NI. In addition I want to be able to track expenses... so if I say book a train ticket for work rather than simply putting it against travel as a category I have a category work expenses: travel. When work pays me back I should then be able to include that in the income line so the two should have a balance out of zero.

So what I did was created a new account called Income Streams. When i get paid I enter in my basic pay, overtime, expenses etc all as income - and with the appropriate category (eg expenses:travel). Then I enter in my deductions - eg Income Tax etc as normal expense items from the account. When I've finished I get a value which should match the net pay on my pay slip. So then all I to is an internal transfer of that amount to my bank account - so it appears there correctly - but I can also see my gross salary, my tax payments etc...

Probably not practical to manually do that for every purchase someone makes from the supermarket so I still do encourage the development of what I'd call 'split' transactions... But for once a month biggies I think its worth the extra effort to use the work around rather than miss the data...