Duplicate transactions when importing QIG

Keith Refson Keith.Refson@earth.ox.ac.uk
Sat, 29 Jul 2000 16:57:53 +0100 (BST)


Bill Gribble writes:

 > The kind of duplicate detection you are looking for is in the feature
 > list for the next revision of the QIF importer.  It's a little
 > trickier, because the fields describing the transaction are often very
 > different (comparing a hand-entered transaction to a downloaded one)
 > and it's hard to determine when two transactions represent the "same
 > thing."

I see the difficulty.  For my purposes an exact match algorithm would
still be useful, since the original transactions were imported from
the QIF file too.  (My bank allows me to download all transactions
from a fixed date only, so updating later in the month includes all of
the earlier transactions).

What do you have in mind for the full facility?  A near-miss match
with a query window?

There is one tricky case even for exact matches, which is ATM
withdrawals.  It is possible to have two withdrawals for the same
amount on the same date to yield identical transactions.  At least my
bank does not record any unique  transaction identifier for these.

Keith Refson
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