Questions about OFX import

David Reiser dbreiser at icloud.com
Wed Aug 14 22:05:15 EDT 2013


On Aug 14, 2013, at 8:24 PM, Niranjan Rao <nhrdls at gmail.com> wrote:

> Greetings,
> 
> This question is mostly applies to investment accounts. OFX imports for checking/credit card accounts do work fine for me.
> 
> When I download ofx transactions for investment accounts, gnucash prompts me with the message to the effect "Please select or create an appropriate GnuCash account for Stock account....".
> 
> This becomes a long, very error prone as I have to navigate through account hierarchy (everything is minimized when the screen comes up) to find the right account where transaction should go.
> 
> Questions:
> 
> 1. In the select account screen, is it possible to show the accounts which match the "type/symbol" of the account in different color? When we create the account for security, it has the security/currency information. OFX file has symbol and name. If gnucash can match the symbol and/or name to the accounts and highlight those accounts, it will be much easier to identify the target account.
> 
> 2. On the same screen, is it possible to display the base account where the ofx transaction started from in different color and at least that part of the tree hierarchy expanded. I have, for example, "My 401K" as investment account and securities I have invested, as child account of this.

Items 1 and 2 can be accomplished by a programmer sufficiently skilled and interested in solving this particular behavior. (i.e., you should enter an enhancement request in bugzilla)

> 3. I read a thread about Gnucash "learning" from ofx transactions few days back. Will gnucash eventually start remembering how I imported this or do I need to keep doing this every time?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Niranjan

 With regards to OFX imports, the 'learning' is related to how you assign target accounts in the Import Transaction Matcher dialog. The securities/stock import message shows up before the Matcher so gnucash will be able to link the account in your hierarchy with the stock referenced in the import. You might call it 'learning', but it's a once-and-done per stock. If you happen to tell gnucash that a second stock is linked to the same account you gave earlier, then you will end up getting queried the next time the first stock shows up in an import. Gnucash overwrites any prior link info when you assign a stock to an account.

Now that gnucash can handle the same individual stock in more than one brokerage account, you will see a request for matching ID for each combination of brokerage + stock.

You'll get asked for an account for income (dividends) for each stock as well when those dividends first appear in an ofx file. You could assign all dividend income to a single account or to a separate account for income for each stock. Dividends are are handled differently from stocks themselves so that you can have one income account as the target for dividends from many stocks. Stocks are one-to-one matches, dividends can be many-to-one.

I found that I had to be careful and be sure to read the "Please select or create..." message carefully and completely every time it came up, or I ended up making incorrect assignments. Some of those mistakes were a pain to fix.

Dave
--
Dave Reiser
dbreiser at icloud.com








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