Interesting QIF Importer "problem"

[Derek Atkins]

grib@gnumatic.com (Bill Gribble) writes:

> The line "L[500 Index]" means a transfer to a bank, credit card,
> brokerage, other asset, or other liability account.  There's no way to
> know which of those, unless you have other information (like an
> Account record, or a previously-existing Gnucash account of similar
> name and one of those types).

And that's the problem..  Vanguard is making transfers directly
between two Mutual Fund accounts.  Does this mean I have to make a
generic "Vanguard Equity Account" that has no meaning in real-life,
just to make GnuCash happy?  I would hope not.  OTOH, I did figure out
how to get the importer to accept a Mutual-Fund account as the
far-acct.  Unfortunately it always assumes a share-price of $1.00,
which works fine provided I import the 500-Index of IT-TaxEx accounts
first ;)

You're right, tho, there is not enough information to actually do
this.  I suppose the right answer would really be a 'Vanguard Equity
Account', at least until we get OFX import support.  The OFX file has
more information about each transaction, so you get the complete
information about both ends of the splits.

> In an attempt to minimize the number of questions the user has to
> answer, I have set up the importer to have a list of candidate types
> sorted by my personal guess of a priori probability.  If no more
> type-weeding can be done, I take the first element of the list.  That
> may mean you get a Stock account where you actually meant a Mutual, or
> an Income where you meant Expense (not likely, but possible if you
> have "rebates" in an Expense account) but that's not a big deal IMO.

Yea, in qif-dialog-utils :)

I suppose, in this case, the right thing to do is the non-intuitive
thing that doesn't quite match reality?

-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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