How To Do My Own Transaction Matching

[David Carlson]

On 12/11/2013 3:15 PM, Michael Iles wrote:
> That's a good question. I've always discounted scheduled transactions
> as not useful (in Quicken, GnuCash) but I'm willing to reconsider. My
> reasons are:
>
> 1. Doesn't seem flexible enough. I don't usually know the exact date
> that a transaction will happen on, e.g. an insurance payment comes out
> once per month... is it always on the same day? I'm not sure. I often
> don't know the amount either, e.g. for a payment on a line of credit:
> the amount depends on the balance of the line of credit. Or I have
> transactions that aren't scheduled but I still want to match, e.g. I
> visit the grocery store once or twice a week and I want to
> automatically match those against my grocery account in GnuCash, but I
> don't know the date or the amount in advance.
>
> 2. Seems like it's the wrong way around. I would rather spend my time
> categorizing existing transactions rather than proactively making
> rules for future transactions. I don't want to spend time trying to
> discern the rules the bank is following for their automatic payments,
> e.g. same date every month, or every 14 days, or first business day
> after a certain date, or whatever.
>
> Just my thoughts.
>
> Mike
>
> On 11 December 2013 15:48, Tommy Trussell <tommy.trussell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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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Michael,

I use scheduled transactions extensively, including having a couple of
completely bogus ones just to reserve future cash for unknown purposes
such as buying groceries, gasoline or haircuts.  I use that method to
predict future cash flow and thereby avoid bank overdrafts (in the
extreme case) or to plan to minimize less productive assets such as
checking account balances.

Granted, many of the regularly recurring transactions are not precisely
fixed either by date or amount, but I do like getting reminded by
GnuCash to look for the next utility bill by having a scheduled and
estimated transaction appear in my check register.  Then I change the
value from an estimate to the real number and date when I go online and
fetch the bill or tell the bank to make the payment.

I know the electric company would prefer to automatically take the
payment out of my checking account, but that is where I draw the line. 
I want to make the final decision about what day to pay it and whether
to pay all of it or to complain that their estimated bill is way out of
line.

It is really nice that GnuCash works well for either your preference or
mine and that we can change our preferences at will.

David C