OFX example

[David Reiser]

On Aug 14, 2010, at 7:16 AM, Wojciech Piekutowski wrote:

> On 12 August 2010 22:43, David Reiser <dbreiser at earthlink.net> wrote:
>> On Aug 12, 2010, at 10:45 AM, Wojciech Piekutowski wrote:
>>> Should I split BANKID and ACCTID like this or is better to stick the
>>> whole account number into ACCTID and leave BANKID? Or maybe use the
>>> bank name as BANKID?
>> 
>> <BANKID> is normally the Routing/Transit Number. As long as it is unique among possible files you'll be importing, that's sufficient. I would leave BANKID and ACCTID separate.
>> 
> 
> Thanks, I'll try your way.
> 
>>> Is FITID used at all by gnucash, for example to match internal
>>> transactions between two client's accounts?
>> 
>> FITID is used internally to match duplicates. For a valid ofx file FITID _must_ be unique forever within a given account. Gnucash stores the FITID in the data schema and compares incoming transaction FITIDs to existing FITIDs in that account. This duplicate tracking makes ofx imports a lot more convenient if your bank always sends you 30 days of history when you download, but you actually download once a week. The FITIDs make it trivial for gnucash to automatically reject duplicate transactions.
>> 
>> The "always unique" and "always the same for a specific transaction" makes it hard to generate FITIDs for transactions from an arbitrary bank download that doesn't contain some kind of unique identifier.
> 
> Let's say I have 2 accounts in this bank and I've transfered money
> from the first to the second. Does GNUCash uses FITID to detect
> internal money transfer?

I don't think so -- you'll have the transaction in both ofx files (ofx is one account per file only) and the FITIDs do not have to match. Usually they wouldn't match. I think when you import each file, gnucash is only trying to match the split associated with the account being imported, so you'd get a match in each account based on date and amount. After importing both ofx files, both sides of the transfer operation would be cleared. I suspect that since FITIDs only have to be unique within accounts, that a matching FITID in a different account is not considered as a possible transfer transaction.

If you have lots of transfers of similar amounts, you will probably run into transaction matching problems.

Dave
--
David Reiser
dbreiser at earthlink.net