Reconciling after QIF import; Quicken conversion
Linas Vepstas
linas@linas.org
Thu, 18 Oct 2001 14:22:58 -0500
On Thu, Oct 18, 2001 at 01:31:19PM -0400, Paul Lussier was heard to remark:
>
> In a message dated: 18 Oct 2001 13:22:38 EDT
> Roland Roberts said:
>
> >>>>>> "Rob" == Rob Brown-Bayliss <on_the_net@clear.net.nz> writes:
> >
> > Rob> Myself, I down load qif's from my bank at least every week.
> > Rob> All my scheduled transactions are handled by the bank (power
> > Rob> and phone bill, mortgage payments etc) and as such are
> > Rob> represented in the qifs...
>
> I tried this, however, the QIFs my bank creates are brain dead:
>
> D09/24/01
> N
> P<Payee Name Deleted> Ref# 010061 Bill Payment
> T-50.00
> M<Payee Name Deleted> Ref# 010061 Bill Payment
> C*
> ^
>
> In order to use these, I still have to go through and decipher
> everything manually. The only advantage I have is that there in
> chronological order. I did write a perl script to go through and
> massage some of this into something that made sense. However, even
> after that, there's still a lot of detail left out of most
> transactions that I want.
After staring at some of the typical OFX that banks generate,
it appears that the state of affairs there is not much better.
That is, its not a QIF thing, its a bank thing.
I'm wondering whether we should think about creating a generic
'translation service', that could recognize transactions of a certain
sort, (such as those delivered by the bank), and 'convert' them
to the form that you want them?
I would imagine that the 'scheduled payment' infrastructure would
be handy for this, in that a scheduled transaction is a kind of a
template that is filled out with the 'real data'.
So, for instance, during QIF import, we'd look at a transaction,
and notice that it matchs up to a template in a table of 'scheduled
transactions'. We'd then fill-in the blanks (date, amount) in the
template from the QIF data ....
--linas
--
pub 1024D/01045933 2001-02-01 Linas Vepstas (Labas!) <linas@linas.org>
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