dealing with invoices and QIF imports

[Charles Day]

On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 11:26 AM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:

> Quoting Charles Day <cedayiv at gmail.com>:
>
>  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?
>>>
>>>
>> I just tried reproducing this, and in fact the QIF importer *does* allow a
>> category to be mapped to an existing GnuCash account with an Asset account
>> type. So that's not the problem.  -Charles
>>
>
> I believe it's a raw Payee/Memo mapping that is purely Income/Expense.
> So if the transaction has no L line, it's assumed to be Income/Expense.
>

I can now reproduce this problem, but it's got nothing to do with the Asset
account type. You can map to that type of account, no sweat. I believe the
problem is that account types A/Receivable and A/Payable are completely
unknown to the QIF importer. I could just add specific support for these two
types, if you think that's good enough. Should be easy. But in general it
really seems to me that if a user picks or approves use of an existing
GnuCash account then the importer should use that account, regardless of
account type, as long as the commodity matches (since we are still
restricted to single-currency imports). That might be a bigger change
though. Your thoughts?

-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
>
>