Another one unhappy with quickfill

[Jeff Kletsky]

I would put it at a level of "strong annoyance" -- it's on my "short 
list" but lower than:

* getting budget-tracking reports available from outside GNUCash
* making OFX transaction matcher to match (or not, depending on your 
perspective) reliably
* getting OFX not to fill in "Account Unknown" or whatever in just about 
every transaction
* getting OFX to put the AMEX transaction number into a description field
* adding a "tag" to period-end roll-up transactions so that they can be 
included or not in balances/sums

so that's why I haven't looked at it in more depth.

The need to type out a whole name that is part of an OFX-entered, 
all-caps name, add a character, then delete it, is a major PITA. Even 
adding a "feature" that is "Don't auto-complete ALL-CAPS descriptions" 
would handle this reasonably well for me. That would also help in 
identifying the OFX-generated transaction rather than the 
manually-entered one (the only reason that isn't on my "short list" above)

Splits, for me, are almost always completely wrong -- I would like to be 
able to turn off multi-split auto-fill (and, ideally, optionally retain 
single-line auto-fill). The better my categorization of things are, the 
more annoying the split fill-in becomes. Line-level descriptions/notes, 
at least the way that I use them (what book it was at Amazon, who was at 
a business meeting, what Sec 125 item was purchased) are very seldom the 
same from transaction to transaction. I would like to be able to turn 
off, completely, descriptions.

What's left?

* Auto-fill mixed- and lower-case transaction-level description
* In the case of a single-line transaction (only), the other account
* (probably the amount as well, though it wouldn't kill me if it wasn't 
there)

The amounts I'm mixed on. About the only place it "helps" is for parking 
meters and the ramen joint where I always order the same thing. 
Otherwise, it is "wrong" for interest, dividend, and payment amounts, as 
well as for the gas stations, grocery stores, online stores, and other 
places I frequent.

In the cases where I do have complex, repetitive splits, such as 
paychecks and loan payments, I use "duplicate transaction" and prefer 
occasional manual intervention to having to use the mouse to remove 
splits on the majority of auto-filled transactions. While I'm not an 
old-school accountant, there is a lot to be said about being able to 
quickly and reliably perform all the day-to-day data entry without 
having to reach for the mouse.

Jeff




On 01/17/2011 03:28 AM, Geert Janssens wrote:
Thanks all for your replies.

So apparently there is room for improvement in different use cases. The
usefullness of quickfill seems to depend on what kind of transactions 
you have
to deal with most.

Can any of you with good suggestions point me to the corresponding 
enhancement
requests in bugzilla for this ?

Geert

On Monday 17 January 2011, David T. wrote:
> Geert--
>
> Issues with Quickfill have come up numerous times over the years, in much
> the same way (see for example
> http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2009-September/031370.html 
>
> )
>
> As I said back then, I personally find Quickfill annoying in its
> implementation; if you import transactions from online sources and they
> are all DESCRIBED IN CAPITAL LETTERS, the user MUST TYPE IN THE ENTIRE
> STRING AGAIN, and then add a spurious character at the end to get their
> modification entered. That (as I noted in the earlier thread) is the
> opposite of quick entry. Anti-Quickfill, if you will.
>
> I would love it if Gnucash's Quickfill had ways for users to work with 
> the
> Quickfill settings, or have Quickfill ignore imported transactions when
> populating the Quickfill database.
>
> I put up with Quirkfill (pun intended), but it sure would be nice if it
> could be improved. Of course, IANAP.
>
> David
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