Find duplicate transactions

[David T.]

Ken--

I don't know if anyone else has answered this yet. 

There are a couple of suggestions I can make:

I guess from your email that you are NOT entering your transactions manually as you go, entering both parts of the split for each transaction as you go. Let me know if I have this wrong...

For importing transactions from bank A, you should endeavor to fill in or match your imported transactions in the druid. This is true for both QIF and OFX import, but is slightly different in each. I use OFX mostly because the matching seems better. You should do this because you are teaching Gnucash how it should try to match future imported transactions. [You may have to ask Gnucash to use Bayesian matching for this to work. Check the preferences for this]. In the OFX import process, you are presented with a list of the transactions and how they're going to be assigned to accounts. Double-clicking on a transaction allows you to select a destination account (it won't handle multiple splits, which I leave in Imbalance, and fix later). Once you accept all the transactions, you should be left with very few with Imbalance splits.

Assuming this to be true, when you now import from bank B, there should be transactions that match, which you won't import (OFX) or MATCH (QIF). The match part of the QIF druid is a little opaque; you must actually tell Gnucash to match the incoming transaction to the existing transaction. That's the tricky part. Since I don't use the QIF importer that much, you should experiment and see what happens.

HTH,
David

--- On Thu, 11/26/09, Ken <kmailuk at googlemail.com> wrote:

> From: Ken <kmailuk at googlemail.com>
> Subject: Find duplicate transactions
> To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> Date: Thursday, November 26, 2009, 8:08 AM
> Hi.  I am quite new to GnuCash
> and have some question with regards to
> finding duplicate transactions.  Is there an easy way
> to do it?  For
> instance, if I have lots of transfers from my account at
> Bank A to my
> account at Bank B and download the transactions I appear to
> have
> duplicate entries in both account.  Bank A shows the
> withdrawal with
> an "Imbalance" as the offsetting transaction. Bank B shows
> a deposit
> with an "Imbalance" as the offsetting transaction. 
> There does not
> seem to be an easy way for me to quickly find and delete
> these
> duplicates.
> 
> It would be nice if there were a search tool that looked
> for all
> transactions which have "similar" transactions. That might
> be defined
> as where two transactions have transactions values with,
> say, 1% of
> each other and dates within, say, 5 days of each
> other.  I could then
> go through this list of "similar" transactions and delete
> the
> duplicates.
> 
> Unless there is already a better way to do so?
> 
> Thanks,
> Ken
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