QIF importer bug in GC 2.2.2 - split transactions

[Charles Day]

On Dec 31, 2007 1:10 PM, Andrew Sackville-West <andrew at swclan.homelinux.org>
wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 31, 2007 at 01:11:22PM -0500, whamblen at northstar.dartmouth.eduwrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I think it'll be easier to explain with a little context.  I have
> hundreds
> > of paycheck entries in Quicken 2004 each of which is a split transaction
> > that has (among other things) two transfers from a checking account to a
> > retirement account: one for the employee's contribution and one for the
> > employer's matching contribution.  These are for the same amount,
> between
> > the same accounts, with only the memo field different.
> >
> > The importer seems to remove these Quicken account <-> Quicken account
> > transfers from the split and put them into new separate GC transactions.
> > That part is fine (actually I wish it wouldn't but the account balances
> are
> > still correct).  The Quicken account <-> Quicken category transfers
> remain
> > in a GC split transaction.  The problem is that one of the retirement
> > transfers *also* stays in the GC split transaction.  In other words,
> where
> > we originally had two transfers from checking to retirement we now have
> > three.
>
> Are you sure you're not confused by the multiple entries to the same
> account causing the txn to show up twice? IOW, If you enter a txn and
> have a credit to checking and two debits to the same other account,
> fromt that other account, the txn will look like *two*. You could test
> this by deleting the txn and seeing that both entries disappear.
>

Andrew, I looked over the QIF file and tried importing it and this is
definitely a bug. I seem to recall having the very same problem recently,
but I haven't followed up on it because the number of affected transactions
was tiny (I think I fixed them by hand). I also encountered bug
114724<http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=114724>during my
imports which may or may not be related.


> >
> > The problem disappears if the amounts are different.  The memo field
> > doesn't seem to change anything (in fact it gets attached to the wrong
> part
> > of the split but I vaguely remember seeing that bug/feature already
> > reported).
>
> There is a fix in trunk for some of the QIF memo/notes issues that
> will hopefully be in 2.2.3.
>

Bill, if you feel like a walk on the wild side, you could test the notes fix
for bug 495219 <http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=495219> by
downloading the latest version of qif-to-gnc.scm
here<http://svn.gnucash.org/trac/browser/gnucash/trunk/src/import-export/qif-import/qif-to-gnc.scm?format=txt>.
It just replaces the one already installed on your system. It won't fix your
main problem with the transfers though - I already tried it with your test
file.

>
> > Anyway, I created a sample QIF file (attached) that demonstrates the
> > behavior.  I didn't see anything in bugzilla but there are an awful lot
> of
> > importer bugs :-) and I may have missed it.  I'm quite happy to file a
> bug
> > report if people think this is a real and not a dupe.  I'm most
> interested
> > in a more immediate workaround if anybody has ideas: either on the
> Quicken
> > end or via a patch to the importer or even just a pointer to where in
> the
> > source I should look.
>

I'm guessing that you must be using 2.2.2, as the ContribX transactions in
your QIF file only became supported a few weeks ago.

I don't have any ideas for an immediate workaround, but I'm willing to dig
through the QIF import code to see if I might be able to find (and possibly
fix) the bug.

Cheers,
Charles