How To Do My Own Transaction Matching

[Tommy Trussell]

On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 2:04 PM, Michael Iles <michael.iles at gmail.com> wrote:

> I would like to be able to do my own transaction matching and I'm
> looking for advice on the easiest way to do it.
>
> (I find that with the built-in Bayesian matching I still have to
> inspect every match, many matches aren't automatically made, sometimes
> the matching history gets lost and I have to start over, etc.)
>
> My goal is to automate all of the regular transactions that happen in
> my account, using heuristics like: (1) if a transaction labeled
> 'insurance' is in one range then it's my car insurance, if it's in a
> different range then it's home insurance; (2) utility bills usually
> have extra numbers so I would look for substrings to match them; etc.
>
> (Aside: in my opinion, the perfect system for GnuCash would be the
> ability to provide a list of regular expressions, along with the
> destination account to use if the regex matches.)
>
>
I see that you have started some excellent and detailed discussion about
the QIF and/or OFX importers and the Python, Guile and C bindings. However
I would like to go back to your original statement and throw out one more
observation --

If your goal is to "automate regular transactions," why not use the
Scheduled Transactions feature?

It seems like you could have GnuCash automatically create ALL automatic
regular transactions. (For example insurance, levelized utilities, and
recurring service charges are three that tend to be very predictable.) Then
if you choose to import OFX or QIF transactions from the bank, you would
need only to ensure the automatic transactions match imported ones
correctly to avoid duplicates.



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