The Point of Transaction download *and Reconciliation (was: missing documentation)

[Christian Stimming]

Am Samstag, 5. Januar 2008 06:05 schrieb Thomas Bushnell BSG:
> > You asked why direct connect would be used. I answered with my use case.
> > If that doesn't suit you, so be it. It /helps/ me keep a better eye on my
> > credit card than keying in paper receipts did.
>
> (...)
>
> Then I said, "it doesn't help with reconciliation" (per se), which still
> seems to be true, and there was then confusion about what reconciliation
> is.  So I clarified that.

Here's the answer: Yes, it does help with reconciliation, as "downloading a 
file and importing it into gnucash" will mark transactions as "cleared" which 
were imported from the downloaded file. Hence, these are marked as "yes, 
those transaction have been executed by the bank on your account". 

However, the reconciliation is still useful because importing transactions 
always has the issue to detect and avoid duplicates. Depending on the file 
format and download protocol, this duplicate detection doesn't work as 
flawlessly as we'd hope - yes, there are download formats that do *not* have 
a unique identifier of each transaction. 

Hence, the user still needs to manually reconcile, but those transactions that 
came from an import will have the check mark already set.

Christian