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


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