Red versus yellow: why?

[David Reiser]

On Apr 15, 2010, at 7:55 AM, Paul A. wrote:

> 
> On what basis does Gnucash decide that a particular transaction should be red
> rather than yellow?
> 

I don't know all the logic involved, but if there are no possible matches, then the matcher will propose to Add the transaction. If other similar transactions have been imported in the past, an Add transaction will be colored green and the target account will be the same as past similar transactions. If the matcher doesn't have any proposed target account, it will mark the Add column and color the transaction yellow to call attention to the fact that you need to pick the second split account.

Some of the red transactions have possible matches in the data file, but the quality of the match is not good enough to merit an "R" choice. Usually that means the date match is not as good as gnucash wants for the little bar graph that gets displayed to be in the green region. You can manually switch a red transaction to either Add or Reconcile. If you switch it to R, you can see how close to green the bar graph is and decide if you want to take a chance that the non-green bar graph isn't really a problem. Sometimes making that choice will end up ignoring imported transactions -- especially if two transactions in the import file get matched to the same existing transaction in the file. Only one imported transaction will get matched, the other possible match will be ignored.

The matcher does have some annoying limitations.

Dave
--
David Reiser
dbreiser at earthlink.net