Method to automatically assign an account?

[Orion Irvine]

Thanks to Derek and Kent. That was very helpful. I was using QFX, the 
default my bank is offers. I'm now using QIF and it's working great.

Thanks again,

Orion



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Derek Atkins" <warlord at MIT.EDU>
To: "Orion Irvine" <oirvine at rogers.com>
Cc: <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
Sent: Sunday, July 13, 2008 1:51 PM
Subject: Re: Method to automatically assign an account?


> 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
>
>> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
>> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>
> -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
>
>