Change category on multiple entries FROM a report

David Carpenter

For example: I have coded all my vacations to a category called "Vacation". I would now, from that report (since I used many different accounts), like to select certain items and send to a new category "Vacation 1" and others to a new category "Vacation 2", without having to go to each individual entry's register and back to the report.

jacobs

Maybe I'm missing something in the question. If you want to change a transaction in a report from one category to another, just click and press Return (or double-click) to edit the transaction. The first click opens a register window, with the transaction you clicked highlighted; pressing Return opens the transaction for editing. Change the category, save the transaction, and click back on the report window. 

RickO

@David Carpenter  Yes, you can do this, but not from a report. Since your transactions are in multiple accounts, the trick here is to use one of the group registers rather than a single account register. You could use the All Transactions register, which will cover everything including investment accounts. But these transactions probably don't appear in investment or property/debt accounts, so you will likely want to use the Banking register. Here's the process:

1. Click the Banking heading in the sidebar
2. Click the magnifying glass in the search box, top right, then click Category to limit the search to the Category column.
3. Enter "vacation" in the search box
4. Select a subset of the "vacation" transactions (in multiple accounts) that you want to change using standard macOS shift-click and/or command-click protocol.
5. Click menu File > Get Info
6. Enter the new category in the Category field and click OK

This will change the category of the selected transactions no matter which Banking account they are in.

One (possibly huge) caveat: Get Info will not change the category of any lines of a split transaction. Unfortunately, those have to be changed one by one.

David Carpenter

Great solution. Good to know about subcategories. If they exist, they should be easy to find by rerunning the Vacation report and then modifying one at a time.