Transaction balancing

[Benoit Grégoire]

On January 21, 2003 05:20 pm, Chris Morgan wrote:

> 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.

No, it doesn't.  You are supposed to enter your transactions in one of two 
ways (assuming there is an import involved, with the ofx/hbci importer).

1-  You are a "Do everything daily" kind of guy.  So you write a GnuCash 
transactions everytime you write a check, spend money, etc.  Say you spend 
40$ on your credit card at "Overpriced Restaurant".  When you come back or at 
the end of the week when you get rid of all the receipt in your wallet, you 
enter a 40$ transaction from "Credit Card" to "Expenses->Restaurant", or 
whatever.  At the end of the week, month, year or whenever, you download your 
credit card statement.  The importer will spot duplicates (with a confidence 
level) and by default mark them as cleared.  Transactions you forgot will 
proably not match, and the importer will have an inconclusive match or 
consider them as new and treat them like in the next case.
2-  You are an "Do everything at once kind of guy".   You don't write your 
transactions as they occur, instead you download your statement at the end of 
the month.  Now the importer should find that all transactions in your credit 
card are new (except maybe payments, if you imported your checking account 
prior to your credit card account).  The first time, all transactions will 
say "Need an account to Auto-Balance xxx$".  You pick an account for each 
one.  In the caase of the 40$ we talked about, you select  
"Expenses->Restaurant" (the importer already knows it's coming from "Credit 
Card").  Now the next month, you don't learn and go to  "Overpriced 
Restaurant" again.  Assuming your bank give you a minimum of info 
electronically, the importer will remember that a transaction at "Overpriced 
Restaurant" from account "Credit Card", goes to "Expenses->Restaurant".  All 
transactions are already cleared at this stage.

In both scenarios, all transactions are balanced, in the exact same accounts, 
at creation time.
-- 
Benoit Grégoire
http://step.polymtl.ca/~bock/