Newbie problems with OFX import and Imbalance account

[David Reiser]

On Mar 11, 2010, at 9:45 PM, Paul Ortega wrote:

> I have recently installed GnuCash and have hit a snag involving importing OFX files.
> 
> I downloaded three months of transactions activity from my Chase Visa account and the transactions were added to the Liabilities:Visa account and the Imbalance account.
> 
> When I tried to sort out the Visa transactions by changing the Transfer from Imbalance to the correct account, I had to click on the account in the Transactions column, then scroll in the menu to choose the correct account.
> 
> This becomes time-consuming when sorting out a large number of transactions.
> 
> I would like to be able to select a number of transactions and change the Imbalance account to the same account.
> 
> For example:
> I would like to sort the transactions in the Visa account by Description.  This would group the transactions at a single merchant together.  For example, the transactions at ACME Supermarket would then appear in a group of consecutive lines.
> Then, I would like to select them and change the account from Imbalance to Expenses:Groceries in all of them at once.
> 
> Is this possible?
> If not, can the multiple selection capability be added soon?
> 
Not possible now.

To my knowledge, no one is working on it. Which means it is unlikely to happen soon. The subject has been raised a number of times over the last few years, but adding the capability hasn't made it high on any of the developer's to do lists.

You don't have to scroll the list, just tab to the field and start typing a couple letters and hit ":" as soon as you have a partial match. For example, in my account list "Expenses:Entertainment:Music/Movies" can be entered as "ex:en:m". You can watch the match as it progresses, so you can hit the colon as soon as that particular subaccount matches correctly.

Dave
--
David Reiser
dbreiser at earthlink.net