Direct Connect

[David Reiser]

On Dec 29, 2011, at 12:53 PM, jack oisher wrote:

> With Quicken, which uses Direct Connect, I can download automatically latest
> transactions from all my bank/financial institutions, and it places the data
> in the appropriate register.  I do not have to manually access a site,
> download a file and then import into the relevant Quicken register for each
> of my accounts.  Does GnuCash have the same capability to use Direct Connect
> as does Quicken?
> 
> If the answer is YES, is there a version of GnuCash suitable for Fedora 14?
> 
Only partially. Quicken stores all your logon information and then sequentially logs into each of your accounts and downloads transactions from each of them in response to your single request. Neither GnuCash nor AqBanking (the utility that handles DirectConnect for GnuCash) will ever store your passwords. So you'll have to enter your password each time you want to download transactions. 

The way it works is while you're looking at the register for an account for which you want to download transactions, you select the Get Transactions menu command, confirm the date range to retrieve (default is since last download), enter your password, and the transactions are retrieved. Since GnuCash is a double entry system, after the transactions are retrieved, you have to specify the other account associated with each transaction. Before I knew about double entry, I would have thought of those other accounts as 'categories'. I don't know whether that matches Quicken's use of the term. Happily, after a few downloads, gnucash can automatically assign a likely second account for incoming transactions. I typically only have to intervene in 2 or 3 transactions out of 20.

I have no idea about Fedora 14 (I get my unix from Apple...).

Dave
--
David Reiser
dbreiser at earthlink.net