question on transaction download/import

[David T.]

Chuck--

Welcome, and congratulations on the migration!

With regard to your specific question, the imported description cannot be changed on import, but must be manually edited after the fact. Depending on how your bank creates these descriptions, you may find that Gnucash's quickfill feature will make many of these changes quick to do. 


If, for example, your Bank's transaction is something like: 


89762346--SAFEWAY AND SONS--JKH92JH98 SD976

it is very easy, using Quickfill, to change it to:

Safeway & Sons

Quickfill will probably get your previous entry after just a few characters.


If, however, your Bank's transaction is something like: 


SAFEWAY & SONS--JKH92JH98 SD976

You're stuck re-keying the entire description all over again, and then adding and removing a spurious character at the end of what you want it to say. This is a Known Behavior of Gnucash's quickfill implementation.

David


If, however, your bank's 



________________________________
 From: Chuck Cox <chuck at chezcox.net>
To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org 
Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2012 2:18 PM
Subject: question on transaction download/import
 
Hi, new Gnucash user here in the process of converting over from
Quicken. I have successfully setup my accounts and imported about 12
years of old Quicken data via QIF files. Believe it or not, this all
went pretty smoothly. The few issues I ran into were caused by stupid
things that Quicken did...

I have also successfully configured Online Banking to fetch
transactions for my checking and savings accounts from my bank's OFX
server.  This is where my question comes in:

After the OFX file is downloaded from the bank's server, the list of
transactions comes up in the "Generic import transaction matcher". I
feel I understand pretty well what this window is showing me and have
figured out how to check what it has matched or to manually match
things if it has failed to find a match. No problems with adding new
transactions or just assigning an account to a transaction.

The problem is that I do not see a way to edit the "Description" of
each transaction in this window. The importing process seems to be
taking the <NAME> and <MEMO> fields from the OFX data, joining them
together, and then sticking them into the description field. After I
am done matching things up and click OK, all the transaction inserted
into the register show this big long string of stuff as the
description which does usually contain the payee in it somewhere, but
with a bunch of other junk I don't need there.

So is there a way to fix the Descriptions from within the matcher, or
do I simply have to go through them all in the register each time and
correct them? I have searched the mailing list archives and found
several past discussions about this sort of thing, but no solutions. I
did see several mentions that the Bayesian capability in the matcher
is supposed to learn and improve over time. Will this address the
issue? I have only downloaded transactions a couple of times so far,
so obviously it hasn't had much of a chance to learn anything yet. :-)


Thanks,
Chuck
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