Transaction balancing

[Chris Morgan]

---- Original message ----
>Date: 21 Jan 2003 13:02:36 -0500
>From: Derek Atkins <warlord@mit.edu>  
>Subject: Re: Transaction balancing  
>To: Chris Morgan <cmorgan@alum.wpi.edu>
>Cc: gnucash-devel@lists.gnucash.org
>
>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.
>

The importers DO allow you to balance the transactions in the
importing window, but like I said I want to go back and
balance the transactions with a similar kind of interface.

>> - 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.
>

How about we don't try as hard?  Locking the user into
balancing an entry just because they clicked on it mistakenly
seems like a silly ui practice.  Maybe instead we can
highlight unbalanced transactions.


>> - 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.
>

This referrs to the register window:  If I click on an
unbalanced transaction and start to balance it I'd like the
option of doing the same automatching that is done during
importing to be done on this transaction.  Also, it would be
nice to be able to rerun the autobalancer at any time and have
it resolve all 100% matches it finds, same date, opposite
amounts etc.  


>> - 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.
>

It does, my beef is mostly with balancing AFTER the importing.
 If I try to balance credit card debits and I have yet to
import my checking or savings account then why bother?  Thats
why it makes sense to have an autobalacing feature that you
can run at any time.

>> 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?
>

Not specifically a programming project.  I'd like to use
gnucash for managing my personal finances but find that it is
way too difficult to manually import a year of credit card
transactions(without the auto accout matching feature that was
brought up), and way too difficult to balance transactions by
hand when it should be a few easy clicks to have gnucash try
to autobalance things for you.

Chris