Issue with Online Banking and multiple accounts

[David Reiser]

On Feb 2, 2013, at 6:55 PM, trevan_gnucash at therichins.net wrote:

> I'm trying to get Online Banking to work with my accounts.  I have two logins to the same bank (mine and my wife's).  I was able to add both the users to the AqBanking setup.  But when I went to retrieve the accounts, it combined the two.  In my login, I have 4 accounts (0001, 0007, 0050, 0135).  In my wife's login, she has 3 accounts (0001, 0007, 0050).  Since the account numbers are the same, it treats them as a single account, yet they are two distinct accounts.  It doesn't seem to care about the logins.  Is there something I can do to fix this?
> 
> I did find a work around.  I manually created the accounts and attached them to the correct user (I had to actually edit the config file because the "user" line was not being set).  I then started to import the transactions for my 0001 account.  That went perfectly. It asked me to select an account for all the transactions (Assets:Current Assets:His:Savings) and the transactions were imported correctly.  I then went to import my wife's 0001 account and it didn't ask me to select an account for all the transactions. Instead, it just assumed the it was mine (Assets:Current Assets:His:Savings).  It looks like it is confused by the fact that the bank routing number and account number are the same for both of us.  But shouldn't it care that it is from two different users?  I don't know how to work around this (besides manually doing the import myself).  Is this a bug or am I just doing it wrong?
> 
> Thanks,
> Trevan
> 

I don't think you can fix it. But I'm confused -- the bank has multiple accounts with the same complete account number? That's odd. On the other hand, if the bank is just sending a subset of the complete number in the ofx file, then I believe they aren't following the ofx standard correctly.

Part of the issue is that the user information is only used by aqbanking to log into the bank's servers. Gnucash doesn't care at all what your bank login information is. Aqbanking only passes to gnucash some or all of the information passed back from the bank in  the ofx data stream. Your user information is not included in the data sent back from the bank. 

It is very unusual for the combination of Financial Institution + account number not to be unique. I have never heard of another case where two customers could have the same account number, but the accounts were separate. How can the bank tell whose transactions are whose?

Dave
--
Dave Reiser
dbreiser at icloud.com