Best way to import data or create transaction

[Niranjan Rao]

David,

Thanks for the input. To some extent I agree with you whether its worth 
the effort or not. On the other hand, I  see it as a generic solution to 
avoid some repetitive tasks. Granted these are small tasks, but overall 
they add up.

I can see this technique useful at following where the transaction is 
regular, but varies in amount, apart from the use case I discussed.

1. Utilities (e.g. Gas/Electricity split, Cell phone bill/Water bill etc.
2. My 401k provider which shows nice page of investments and fees, but 
no downloads of any type except statements. I have manual entertainment 
of entering the transaction data for my current contribution.

If I do it right, I will be able to use the same/similar technique with 
utilities and my 401k provider. This will avoid me tedious work of going 
to multiple sites, navigating to proper pages and getting the required 
details. By rough estimate it would save me 5 minutes per account that I 
automate, may be more if you add stupid mistakes *I* make while 
copy/pasting data and then correcting it.

Another place where this scraper came real handy is to download ofx 
transactions. My bank charges fees to setup "quicken" based banking. I 
want just ofx transactions and do not want to use built in functionality 
to get transactions because of fees. They do allow free downloads if I 
login to website though, which is what my scraper uses.

My scraper, already in use,  wakes up at desired frequency, downloads 
the transactions and are ready to be imported in gnucash. I can probably 
automate that part also, but have not spent enough time on gnucash api 
side of the world.

I know scraping will break and I'll make mistakes. But hoping that 
monthly reconciliation will help me flush out the bugs.

Besides, it's a dream of this lazy man to automate the things as much as 
possible and spend all that saved time reading flame wars in the 
comments of yahoo news :)

Regards,

Niranjan

On 07/30/2013 04:12 PM, David Carlson wrote:
> On 7/30/2013 5:01 PM, Niranjan Rao wrote:
>> Greetings,
>>
>> Paycheck I receive varies every cycle and as a result so does the
>> split amounts of the transaction. The service provider my company uses
>> has data available on the site, but no downloads except payslip stub
>> in PDF format.
>>
>> I have written a simple scraper and I able to login and scrape data
>> from service provider.
>>
>> Normally I get a notification few days in advance about upcoming
>> paycheck. I would like to scrape data and create a transaction in
>> gnucash that has right splits based on this scraped data. Ideally I
>> should be able to change upcoming scheduled transaction with the new
>> data.
>>
>> What will be the best way to do this? I am not yet saving the scraped
>> data so changing incoming data format is not a big deal.
>>
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Niranjan
>>
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> Is it worth the effort to do that?
> There are two fairly easy alternatives.
> 1. Once a transaction has been entered, use the Duplicate transaction
> button to make a copy, then edit it to represent the next paycheck.
> 2. Once a transaction has been entered, use the Schedule button to
> create a scheduled transaction.  After the next transaction is entered,
> edit it to match the new values.  If you can imagine a 'typical' or
> 'boilerplate' paycheck transaction that would need less editing (or
> simpler editing) each time, that may work best.
> Granted, either method requires human intervention.
> David C
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