Problems with QIF import for checking account - category matching seems horribly designed

[Randy Burgess]

I should clarify that I use the import process primarily to reconcile 
checking - not to import totally new transactions.

As I remember the old process, if you identified a transaction as a 
"dupe," the dupe expense account was used - thus there was no wiping out 
of this info when importing checking account transactions. That appears 
to be gone now.

> For one reason or another I haven't used the QIF import function in 
> about a year. Today I just made my first try at importing a QIF for my 
> checking account, and to my dismay the functionality has been altered 
> to effectively make it useless -  unless there's some clever trick I'm 
> missing. (This is Gnucash 1.8.11 on Gentoo.)
>
> Here's the problem: The import wizard forces you to match categories 
> before it proceeds to actually do the import. The idea seems to be 
> that it will remember the matches and automate this process the next 
> time around.
>
> But why does it need to match categories like this in the first place? 
> It didn't used to, back in previous versions (whatever I was using a 
> year ago).
>
> Obviously this process can't handle splits, of which I have many. It 
> can't handle the fact that for many of my payees, I have more than one 
> category depending on the nature of the expense.
>
> So basically the import is more trouble than it's worth. And I haven't 
> found any options to get around the problem.
>
>