As I was paying my bills this weekend, I started to wonder what effect rising gas prices had had on my businesses. We track transportation costs for three principal things here: personal use, business use and volunteer use. Transportation costs for personal use are not tax deductible. Business and charitable uses are deductible, but in different ways. I wanted to create a report to break down actual costs between these three usage modes to get a snapshot on taxes this year. GnuCash is a terrific tool for generating just these kinds of highly specific reports.

All I needed to do was to select Edit | Find from the main GnuCash accounts screen. That combination brings up one of the most simple to use, yet most powerful, tools in the GnuCash toolbox. The GnuCash find transaction dialog is shown here.

This simple dialog allows you to select any of the transaction fields you want to include in your search - as many as you want, and in any order you like. You can search within a single account, in only a few accounts of your choosing or in all accounts. You can search for transactions exceeding a certain amount. You can limit your search to only reconciled, or non-reconciled, transactions. Want to look for that check you wrote two years ago to that lawn service company whose name you can't remember? Just search for "mowing" in the notes field.

When you click the Find button all transactions meeting your criteria appear almost immediately on the screen. They're presented in the familiar account ledger style in the GnuCash Search Results tab. From there you can do whatever you like with them. You can print them out for your accountant's use. You can modify any of them as if you were accessing each transaction on its own account screen.

Now, you might not think this is really that big of a deal. Let me say, though, having come from using Microsoft Money for many years and Quicken for years before that, this simple yet powerful feature just blew me away when I first saw it in action in GnuCash. If I were writing a comparision between Microsoft Money and Gnucash, the clear winner based on this criteria would be GnuCash. When you try it for yourself you'll understand.

Many of the reports I generate today start with the GnuCash Find Transactions dialog. As a Microsoft Money user, I avoided it because it was slow and clunky and produced terrible results which were hard to work with. In GnuCash, this simple and powerful tool has become a favorite.