Importing both sides of a transaction

[Ewan Slater]

Hi Derek,

Thanks.

Adding the line LExpenses:Car:Petrol adds the other side of the split.

A little further digging around the QIF specification would suggest that I
should be able to use something like:
SLiabilities:Mastercard
EAccount to be charged
$-50
SExpenses:Car:Petrol
EAccount to be paid
$50

But a freaky thing happens - the account that gets charged (and indeed
created) is Equities:Retained Earnings

Bizarre.

In any case the L code gets me a long way towards where I want to be.

Thanks again,

Ewan

On 30 July 2012 23:45, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Ewan Slater <ewan.slater at googlemail.com> writes:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm trying to automate pulling work expenses into GnuCash.
> >
> > I can download my bank / credit card information as QIF or OFX.
> >
> > I can download my work expenses in CSV format.
> >
> > What I would like to do is to merge the data from the bank with that for
> > the expenses application so I can then import one file which contains
> both
> > sides of the transaction.
> >
> > Can anyone tell me how to represent both sides of the transaction in QIF
> or
> > OFX, so that the debit and credit sides of the transaction can be
> assigned
> > automatically to the correct account please?
> >
> > If I know how to represent it in either file format I can then write an
> app
> > to merge the data for import.
>
> With QIF you need to supply a multi-account QIF file.  It's slightly
> more complicated, and I don't know of any examples offhand.  IIRC you
> need to supply some !Account settings for the various QIF accounts, and
> then for each account you supply the transactions.  Then you can use
> L[OtherAccount] to specify that a transaction goes from the current
> account to the other account.  The importer will then make this happen.
>
> Note that this only works between Assets and Liabilities.
>
> If you want to specify an Income/Expense account then you can use
> LCategory.
>
> In both cases LCategory and L[Account] you have the ability to map the
> QIF Account and QIF Categories to GnuCash accounts.
>
> Hope this helps,
>
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Ewan
>
> > Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> > You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>
> -derek
>
> --
>        Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
>        Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
>        URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
>        warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available
>