dealing with invoices and QIF imports

[Charles Day]

On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 9:46 AM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:

> Quoting Charles Day <cedayiv at gmail.com>:
>
>  Well no one is telling the importer that it's an income account. It must
>> be
>> defaulting, and it shouldn't do that if Assets:A/R already exists. An
>> Asset
>> account type should be considered compatible.
>>
>
> The QIF is.   You should know that.  QIF Accounts are Asset/Liabilities.
> Everything else is Income/Expense.  So yes, there is a default account
> type based on the actual QIF transaction information.  Whether or not
> this is right or wrong I leave for another day, but the way the QIF
> importer is currently structured makes it very hard to just remove
> this....
>

I think the rules are looser than that for QIF payee/memo mappings, but
maybe his QIF doesn't provide an payee or memo so a category mapping is
getting used. It's true that if a category mapping is being used and a new
GnuCash account is being created (checkmark appears in the mapping page),
then the created account type will be Income or Expense. But regardless, if
the user specifies (via the GUI) an existing GnuCash account to use for a
category mapping, then in my opinion the importer ought to honor that choice
regardless of account type (the commodity still must match). If it's not
doing that, then that seems like a bug to me, or at least overrestrictive
babysitting. What's your opinion?

-Charles

name perhaps slightly different, like Assets:Accounts Receivable? That could
>> explain the behavior.
>>
> Does he really have an existing GnuCash account named Assets:A/R, or is the
>
> This question is irrelevant.  He's telling the importer to create an
> account Foo:Bar.  If Foo:Bar doesn't exist then it will be created
> with the correct type (in this case, Income).  If Foo exists and is
> a compatible type then it will just create Bar.  However if Foo exists
> and is NOT compatible then it will create Foo2 of the correct type.
>
> I'm not exactly sure why it creates Bar2 as well, but it does in this
> latter case.
>
> In HIS case he asked for Assets:<Something>...  Assets already exists
> but is incompatible with Income, so it creates Assets2.
>
> Note that compatibility is two-fold..  There is account-type compatibility
> AND currency/commodity compatibility.  I believe that either case will
> cause a new tree to get created.
>
>  -Charles
>>
>
> -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
>
>