importing transactions without setting CREC

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

"G. Paul Ziemba" <pz-gnucash-devel at ziemba.us> writes:

> I'd like to automate some of my transaction entry by parsing
> OCRed scans of my credit card receipts for account numbers,
> dates, totals, etc. and producing transaction data that I can 
> import to gnucash.
>
> First I generated OFX format data. It worked OK, but all the
> transactions are flagged as cleared when they should be just 'n'.
> This behavior seems to be hard-coded into the ofx import logic.
> It makes sense if you assume OFX always represents a bank
> statement.

Yes, it does, because why would you actually try to write OFX when there
are significantly easier formats (like QIF).

> I looked at QIF, which appears to support a transaction field
> indicating the reconciled status, but it seems as if I will need
> to walk through a series of popups to match the categories each
> time I import (despite the QIF account strings being crafted to
> match the gnucash account paths). Maybe I am mistaken here: is
> gnucash supposed to remember the associations for future QIF
> imports?

You can just keep clicking 'next'.  The default is to map the category
or QIF account directly to a GNC Account of the same name.  So if you
specify categories and accounts in the form of Expenses:Groceries then
you don't have to do anything special.  And if you DO map them, gnucash
will remember the bindings for the next import.

> It seems the most streamlined approach would be to enhance the
> OFX parser and importer to recognize a new tag inside <STMTTRN>,
> such as perhaps <RECONCILE>, that would specify the reconcile
> status for the transaction. It would default to 'c' to retain
> the existing behavior for standard OFX files, of course. I'm
> willing to produce a patch to do this.
>
> It could also be done with a global preference switch, but that 
> seems more prone to error (forgetting to change it when needed).
>
> Have I overlooked anything? Is there a better way to solve the
> problem?

Use QIF, and just click next a few times to walk through the process...

-derek
-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
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