Using bank exports (CSV, QIF,...) to avoid the overhead that comes from processing bills

Tom Van Braeckel tomvanbraeckel at gmail.com
Wed Mar 10 03:30:29 EST 2010


>
>
> > My question is: What are you other business users doing to (partially)
> > automate their MKB workflow ?
> I use the business features, but because the importers are not aware of
> those,
> I simply don't use those.
>
> Not much for automation of course, but in my workflow it doesn't make much
> of
> a difference.
>
> See, I put all my bills and invoices in GnuCash. When I make a payment via
> my
> bank, I immediately use GnuCash' "Pay bill" feature to add this payment
> into
> GnuCash. I don't write many customer's invoices, so there's not many
> customer
> payments in my bank accounts.
>
> When it's time to match the bank's statements with my GnuCash accounts, I
> still manually add all the the missing entries in GnuCash.
>
> This works because I don't have much traffic. I don't know what you could
> do
> currently to improve this when you have to deal with a lot of
> invoices/bills.
>


That's about the same thing I was doing, but lately I'd been procrastinating
those chores, which made my quarterly VAT report a dauntingly complex and
time-consuming undertaking. And that's when I started dreaming about
automating the heck out of my workflow :-)



>
> > What do you think about my idea, or what other approaches would you
> suggest
> > ?
> >
> As said, no idea... For me the using the business features takes priority
> over
> automated import because it helps me catch mistakes (paid too much/too
> little,
> missing invoices). The past has proven that such mistakes are very real.
>
>
Well, only one solution: test it.

I'm going to try this for bills (not for outgoing invoices) by taking the
CSV exports from my bank, converting them to enriched QIF files (which also
hold the opposing entries) and importing those, without using the MKB
features.

As for catching mistakes:

   - Paying too little (or not at all) rarely happens and will probably just
   just result in a reminder, so I don't think that will be a significant
   issue.
   - To avoid *being* paid too little (or not at all), I will just keep
   using the MKB features for outgoing invoices. They only constitute about 1/4
   of my paperwork anyway, so I can live with that (for now).

 Automation, Ho !


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