How To Do My Own Transaction Matching

[Michael Iles]

Your points (and David's) are certainly valid. If you were doing
stereotypical user personas for GnuCash you would have a 'proactive'
user who likes to use scheduled transactions for budgeting, verifying
transactions, saving on data input, etc.; and a 'reactive' user who
works primarily from imported statements. I'm certainly in the latter
camp: I review all the transactions, but I want to do as little data
entry as possible (ideally zero).

Looking at it another way: scheduled transactions only cover the
'regular' transactions, leaving the irregular ones to be done by hand
(or via the Bayesian matcher, etc.). On the other hand a more
expressive matching facility at import time would cover *both* regular
and irregular transactions.

Mike.

On 12 December 2013 00:10, Tommy Trussell <tommy.trussell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 3:15 PM, Michael Iles <michael.iles at gmail.com>
> 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.
>
>
> Fortunately, most billing systems are extremely predictable. Customers
> usually get assigned a date in the billing queue, and weekends are usually
> handled in a predictable way, too. The SX (scheduled transaction) system in
> GnuCash can be set to automatically enter scheduled transactions before or
> after weekends.
>
> When I have a scheduled transaction for a variable bill (utility, credit
> card) GnuCash allows EITHER use a variable for the amount and the system
> will prompt for it when the transaction gets created, or one can enter a
> "typical" or "placeholder" amount in the transaction, and edit it after the
> transaction gets created.
>
> In either case, I use the online notice or statement I receive from the
> company to enter the correct amount on the correct date. (Just like I did
> when I got paper bills.) I use the Scheduled Transaction "notify in advance"
> feature so I know to watch for the transaction about the time I usually get
> the bill, and I have the transaction pre-set for the date it usually gets
> drafted. However I can examine the bill and adjust the date the company says
> they plan to draft the account.
>
>>
>> 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.
>
>
> I don't use scheduled transactions for these -- I key them in individually.
> If I were more habitual about going to the grocery store on a certain day
> every week I suppose I might consider doing this, too. Scheduled
> transactions are very helpful for watching known recurring transactions. One
> always has the choice to ignore and/or modify the ones the system generates.
>
>>
>> 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.
>
>
> I can understand how you might feel this way -- I spend some number of
> minutes every week chasing down bills and receipts to enter into GnuCash.
> HOWEVER if I just relied upon the imported transactions as they came through
> the bank, I might not catch any fraudulent or erroneous ones. Fortunately I
> haven't had many over the years, but there have been a few.
>
> Personally, I am not ready to rely on imported transactions and stop keying
> in my receipts and bills to assign accounts and amounts. With the
> reconciling process I catch monetary mistakes, then at tax time I catch
> errors in the accounts assignments. I believe I would have a lot harder time
> getting the accounts right via imported transactions for my credit card, for
> example. (I often have more than one type of transaction from the same
> store.)
>
> But I believe I understand what you're hoping to achieve with the
> transaction importer, and that's the point of this thread.