Loading bank excerpts into GNUCash automatically

[Benoit Grégoire]

On Mon 16 September 2002 13:35, Simon Vandemoortele wrote:
> Dear fellow GNUCash users,
>
> I would like to know if any of you have encountered this problem before
> and if so, what solution you have come up with.
>
> Problem:
> =======
> My bank allows me to download my bank account excerpts in tab-separated
> text files. I would very much like to automatically generate GNUCash
> transactions from these excerpts.
> Strictly speaking, this is of course an unsolvable problem since
> user-input is required to decide the "from" and "to" accounts of a
> transaction. (Only I can really know what the banking transaction means.)
> Still 50% of my banking transactions  could be  detected and translated
> to GNUCash transactions automatically.
>
> State of affairs:
> ===========
> To solve this problem I've considered writing a script to do the
> conversions I need. I am however unsure about the way I should insert
> the information into GNUCash; should I simply add transactions to the
> .xac file ? should I generate a QIF file and import it ?
>
> Solutions:
> =======
> I am confident other people must have attempted the same feat. What
> advice can you give me ?

Sorry about the delay, aparently your message was delayed for over a week 
before being delivered.  

Clearly you should NOT write directly to the .xac file.  Writing a QIF will 
work, and is perhaps simpler for you.  However as I said on the list a few 
weeks ago, there is now a generic import infrastructure being written by me 
and Christian Stimmings which you should use.  It does 
the account matching and transaction matching/reconciling part.

It involves writing a GnuCash module but all that would be left for you to do 
is get the data into gnucash data structures.

I suggest you grab CVS gnucash and take a look at 
src/import-export/generic-import-design.txt
and the ofx module:
src/import-export/ofx/

The ofx module is still very simple and might give you a good idea of what you 
have to do.  I would be happy to help you getting this underway if you are 
interested, especially since a few people on on gnucash-user have exressed 
interest in the past month.  Don't forget to subscribe and post your 
questions on gnucash-devel.

Good luck,