question about importing .qif files

James A. Treacy treacy@debian.org
Fri, 21 Jul 2000 11:08:30 -0400


At a minimum, could the importer be modified so that you can select which
field is used to select accounts when importing, e.g. the Memo field
instead of the category (L in .qif)? When importing data from my bank, all
the transactions appear to come from a single, blank category. This means
all transactions need to be dumped into a single account and then manually
moved around. Using the Memo field would allow most of the entries to be
automatically placed in the proper place.

If a hierarchy were used it would be even better. Often, the
Memo field is sufficient, but if the Payee field were used instead,
when it is non-blank, even more accounts could be put in the right
place.

I am thinking of something like the following:
   Choose the order tags are used to select the destination account:
      Category 1
      Payee    2
      Memo     3
The above shows the default ranking. The destination account is chosen 
by using the highest ranked non-blank tag in an entry.

Here are two typical entries from my bank:

!Type:Bank
D05/31/00
MAutomated Banking Withdrawal            
NABW
P
T-100.00
^
D05/29/00
MElectronic Debit Memo                   
NEDM
PATT CANADA                              
T-28.85 
^

'Automated Banking Withdrawal' should be mapped to the the cash account
and 'ATT CANADA' mapped to the long distance account.

The above scheme would hopefully handle a larger percent of the .qif
formats out there.

-- 
James (Jay) Treacy
treacy@debian.org