Auto-fill in registers: how does it work?

[Charles Day]

On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 8:53 AM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:

> "Charles Day" <cedayiv at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > When manually entering new transactions in the register, how does the
> > auto-fill capability work? Does it (a) just look at existing
> transactions,
> > make a guess at a match, then copy the information? Or does it (b) draw
> that
> > information from a bucket of "memorized transactions"?
>
> GnuCash does (a).  It looks back in time and finds the most recent
> transaction with the same Description, and then copies that information.
>
> > Quicken does the latter and, and some versions allow that separate
> bucket of
> > "memorized transactions" (transaction templates, essentially) to be
> exported
> > to QIF format.
> >
> > I ask due to an enhancement request for importing these via the QIF
> > importer.
>
> GnuCash has no "memorized transactions" concept.  The CLOSEST would
> be the SX, but I think that's completely different.  But I don't know.
> I've never used Quicken.
>

Yeah, SX is a completely different thing. Quicken has those too, but doesn't
export them to QIF.

A little background: Quicken maintains a list of "memorized transactions".
When manually entering a new transaction in an account register, if the user
enters a payee that has one memorized transaction associated with it, then
Quicken copies the information from the memorized transaction into the
register. If instead there are multiple memorized transactions associated
with that payee, then Quicken presents a drop-down list of them to the user,
who then picks one of them to copy the information from. There are some
extra bits of automation to it, but that's the basics.

I've posted this information on bug 350286, which I think ought to be
closed.

Cheers,
Charles


> > Cheers,
> > Charles
>
> -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 at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available
>