OFX approaches and QIF Import

[Scott Drennan]

On Sun, Oct 28, 2001 at 04:31:48PM -0500, Derek Atkins wrote:

> I'm very interested in seeing this happen, but I don't have a Gnucash
> development environment at the moment (I just spent the last three
> days getting 1.6.4 built!)  But I'd certainly like to see OFX support
> for the same reason you do: do be able to download transaction
> information from banks and consoldate a complete financial picture
> locally in Gnucash.

Nor do I, for much the same reason, so working from 1.6.4 seems
reasonable, since what we'd be doing would be limited to the QIF import
module for now.

Derek, I'll contact you off-list to brainstorm further... once we have
something reasonable we can bring it back to the list for comments.

For initial parameters I'm thinking:

1.  Parse downloaded OFX files and identify transactions
2.  Modify transactions to correct financial institution ideosynchracies
3.  Automatically correlate the <BANKID> and <ACCTID> in the OFX file
with a gnucash liability or asset account
4.  Match OFX transactions with existing gnucash transactions similar to
current QIF import.

There's lots more that could be done, but we'll go off and start
thinking unless anyone has strenuous objections to this initial
direction.

cheers,
Scott