Linking transactions from different accounts

[David Carlson]

On 11/29/2013 6:43 PM, xjordanx wrote:
> Okay, now I am getting into this for real. I am reading the GnuCash Small
> Business Accounting book, and trawling the tutorial and concepts guide, but
> can't seem to find the answer to what I think should be a simple question:
>
> I have two accounts, for example: Checking, and an auto loan. 
>
> I import both into their respective accounts in GnuCash - one in the
> checking account under assets, and the other in the auto loan account under
> liabilities. 
>
> The checking account shows loan payments coming out. The loan account shows
> the payment transactions coming in. 
>
> How do I link the payment withdrawal from the checking account to the
> payment in the loan account without causing duplications? 
>
> Follow-on question: is there some way to have gnucash automatically match
> the payments in my imported loan data to the ones in my imported checking
> account?
>
> -Ben.
>
>
>
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Either You already have duplicated transactions or they are already
linked and you think they are not because they really do appear in both
account registers. 

If you re-read the Tutorial section called Transactions you see that
every transaction has at least two parts, a 'from' account and a 'to'
account.
When viewing the transaction in one account register you see the name of
the other account in the register (or split if there are more than two
accounts).  If you right click on that other account name, one of the
options in the pop-up is 'Jump.'  Click on that and you will be in the
other account register. 

If the transaction actually is duplicated, you will see it twice in both
registers and the running balances are too low or too high.

Moving on to to your question about imports, GnuCash will try to match
imported transactions to existing transactions, but it cannot do a
prefect job because sometimes there actually are multiple transactions
that look identical.  Thus the Import assistants each have a point in
the process where the user gets a chance to verify that the matching is
being done correctly and to fix errors of unknown import account,
unknown transfer account, mismatched or unmatched transactions.  Even
that does not always work perfectly, so you must be vigilant when importing.

Have fun.

David C