Transaction balancing

Derek Atkins warlord@MIT.EDU
Tue Jan 21 18:02:36 CST 2003


Chris Morgan <cmorgan@alum.wpi.edu> writes:

> After importing savings/checking/credit card accounts I'd like to go back and 
> balance the transactions.  I noticed two things:

How did you import it?  The importers themselves should allow you to
balance the txns in the importer.

> - In the register window if I click on a transaction that isn't balanced I'm 
> completely unable to switch to another transaction without manually balancing 
> it, letting gnucash add a adjusting split or adjusting the current account 
> total.  It would be nice if instead the transactions were color coded and 
> this window didn't pop up by default.

The register doesn't want to allow you to have unbalanced
transactions, so it is going to try REALLY HARD to force you to
balance them.  It's not hard to balance it.  Worst case you add a
split to "Equity:Unbalanced" and come back to it later.

> - If I do want to balance a transaction there doesn't appear to be any easy 
> way to do so.  A simple algorithm to search for transactions in other 
> accounts with the same amount on the same day could do most of this 
> automatically, for more complex balancing it would be nice to be able to 
> search through and highlight the transactions that balance the current one.  
> I liked the auto transaction balance feature during the import although it 
> gives full bars to most every transaction and lists several, I had no idea 
> what it was going to do by default, it looked like it was going to use all of 
> the transactions it found to balance the imported one and listed several.  
> Again, matching with amount/date would be nice.

I'm confused.  Are you talking about trying to balance from the
importer or from the register?  If the importer, _WHICH_ importer?
The QIF importer will (should) auto-balance everything.  The OFX
importer Red-Marks all imbalanced transactions.

Outside the importer you can CERTAINLY search for unbalanced
transactions from the Find Transactions Dialog if you just want to go
through and find them.

> - During importing there is no way to group accounts by the imported 
> informatin provided.  Eg. "Mobil" would be a good search term by which all 
> entries could be mapped to Auto->Gas or the user specified account.  Some 
> kind of autodetection seems not so difficult.

There should be a way to apply a match from imported information to an
account.  The QIF importer does this.  I haven't played with the OFX
importer to see if it does or how well it does it.  I know there is an
interface to store and lookup matching information -- I don't know if
the "generic import" code actually uses it.

> Ideas?  I was looking for something relatively small since I'm very unfamilar 
> with the codebase, I wouldn't mind helping out in implementing one of these 
> things if someone could lend some guidance.

Are you looking for a programming project?  You could look at
src/import-export and try to hook in the import-match-map code if it
isn't there, or try to supply additional algorithms for matching.
Perhaps a scheme interface for matching, so it's easily scriptable?

> Thanks,
> Chris

-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
       warlord@MIT.EDU                        PGP key available



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