Method to automatically assign an account?

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Quoting Orion Irvine <oirvine at rogers.com>:

> Hello,
>
> I'm just starting to use Gnu Cash. I've imported the last several 
> months of my transactions into Gnu Cash (using a transaction report 
> my bank provides for me online). So far, I haven't found any way to 
> automatically assign categories / accounts to each transaction. For 
> example, all of my transactions with description "Enbridge" are gas 
> utility payments, so it would be nice to automatically assign them to 
> the Expenses:Utilities:Gas account.
>
> I have several thousand transactions, and doing them manually sounds 
> very daunting, but leaving them as "Unbalance" seems to defeat the 
> purpose of tracking my transactions. I also intend to import my 
> transactions from my bank account on a regular basis instead of 
> entering them manually (almost all of my transactions are debit, not 
> cash, so getting them from my bank is the easiest way for me).
>
> Is there a way to automatically categorize transactions? For me, this 
> is a deal breaker. If Gnu Gash can't do this, then I'll be buying a 
> commercial product that can.

How are you importing the transactions?  Both the QIF and OFX importers
have methods to map import transactions to GnuCash accounts.  However
this happens DURING import, not afterwards.  Without knowing which method
you used I can't provide precise instructions.  QIF lets you assign based
on Payee/Memo, OFX does require you to map each transaction (which means
you should start with a small subset for import and then continue with
it later).  Both systems remember the mappings and will auto-apply them
on future imports.

Unfortunately there is no way to operate on multiple transactions at
once.

> Thanks,
>
> Orion Irvine

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-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available