QIF import balances wrong due to same account transfers

[Derek Atkins]

Mark Stosberg <mark at summersault.com> writes:

> 1. Does anyone have suggestions for a workaround for this, either by
> using Quicken or GnuCash to fix the entries? I'd like avoid
> hand-editting every entry if possible.

"Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I shoot this gun into my foot..."

What you are in essence doing with these adjustments are telling
Quicken "I'm adjusting account X from account X", and, well, GnuCash
is taking you literally.  The GnuCash QIF Importer doesn't look at
transactions individually -- it combines all Categories together and
processes them all at once.

GnuCash will never special-case a transaction into itself.  For one
thing, there are times when you DO want multiple splits into the same
account, so there just isn't a decent heuristic to use.  Besides,
GnuCash is doing exactly what you told it to do, so IMHO this is
an operator error, not a GnuCash problem.

In the end, you are going to have to edit each of your adjustment
transactions.  Whether you do this by hand, in Quicken, or via a
PERL script doesn't matter.  But you're going to have to fix it
yourself.

> 2. Is there a way that GnuCash could more gracefully handle this case,
> either by doing some automatically, or warning the user there could be a
> problem? 

But there is no problem.  GIGO, as they like to say.  What you did
is perfectly valid, it just doesn't mean what you THOUGHT it meant.
There is no error here, just garbage input (from YOUR perspective).
>From GnuCash's perspective, the input is perfectly valid and it
dealt properly.

Sorry.

> Thanks!
> 
> 	Mark

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available