Importing CSV files and specifying the account to transfer

[Derek Atkins]

zork <edwin at acm.org> writes:

> Thanks for your response and clarifying the issue.
>
>>> These correspond to the QIF fields: D, L, M, T.
>
>> If you know this then why not just convert your CSV to QIF and use the
>> QIF importer?
>
> That is what I do at present, I just hoped to short circuit the conversion. 

Nah, you're much better off (IMHO) using the QIF importer than the CSV
importer.  It's older and better-tested.  :)

> I use a spreadsheet I made that learns which transactions correspond to
> which accounts, so it would have been nice to stay in a more spreadsheet
> friendly format. Generating qif from a spreadsheet is rather ugly.

??  Calc2qif doesn't work well?

>> No, you are correct; that importer does not know about that.
>> It presumes you will assign the target account.
>
> That is very (!) time consuming.

Well, the importer learns from your behavior, but it takes time to train
it.  Remember, CSV, OFX, HBCI, etc. are all designed to come from a
financial institution, and there is no expectation that those
institutions have ANY idea how to classify your transactions.  QIF,
however, is an actual "interchange format", designed to include the
target (account and category) pointers for transactions.

This all begs the question of why you're using a spreadsheet at all
instead of just entering your transactions into gnucash directly?

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-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
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