Help with OFX in Gnucash

[Benoit Grégoire]

On July 10, 2012 05:32:54 PM Ngewi Fet wrote:
> Yes, there is:
> http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2012-April/033857.html
> At the beginning of this project, consensus on this mailing list was that
> OFX is a better idea
> than QIF.

Well, OFX is a half competent (by banking standards...) and fully specified way 
of modeling banking transaction.

Unfortunately, unlike QIF it does not even try to model an accounting storage 
system.  So qif has a bit less of an impedence mismatch with what you are 
doing, and is simpler.

Whatever you do you'll have to make some changes in gnucash's import system 
for a good user experience.  Offhand, either:

You use OFX in which case for a goood experience you'll probably need to: 
* Support explicit OFX transfer between accounts (even libofx doesn't have 
support yet I believe, I could help you with the libofx part).  That's the 
only mecanism in OFX to explicitely model where the money is going.  
Unfortunately, it doesn't allow modeling a transaction involving more than two 
account (cash, expense and taxes for example).
* Support an account having multiple ids (and a simple gui to manage it).  
Note that the account id can be any 22 caracters,and are displayed to the user 
at account matching, so there is nothing stopping you from having them 
meaningfull in you mobile app, as long as they no longer change once defined.

You use QIF in which case for a goood experience you'll probably need to:
* Extend the format (and importer)  to add a transaction identifier, otherwise 
you are going to have a real painfull user experience.

-- 
Benoit Grégoire, ing., PMP, PSM