Matching transactions

[John Ralls]

> On Jul 15, 2015, at 3:22 PM, C <Peace at AleksandrSolzhenitsyn.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 07/15/2015 04:37 PM, Liz wrote:
>> On Wed, 15 Jul 2015 13:13:18 -0400
>> "." <peace at AleksandrSolzhenitsyn.net> wrote:
>> 
>>> How do I get GC to properly, or more accurately, label a transaction
>>> into the category it belongs?
>> There is a point in the import at which you correct the allocations. I
>> haven't got any file handy to import and advise further, but that is
>> the important point.
>> 
>> At that time, you can't actually see enough of the transaction to know
>> what it really was, so at first you will need some idea of what a
>> payment was for, so you can send the household gas bill to Utilities:Gas
>> instead of Utilities:Electricity.
> Liz,
> 
> That takes way too much time. It's just too darn slow. I at least a
> hundred transactions per month on various credit cards.
> 
> I guess there's no way to do it quickly except working in the
> "imbalanced USD" account.

Current pain for future gain. Once you have the import matcher trained so that it matches correctly imports go a lot faster, though in order to keep the matches correct you do have to check them all every time and correct any that are wrong. The reason Liz and I recommend that you start with small imports is that you benefit from the matches sooner: The matcher makes only one pass through the import before presenting the match window so if you have several similar transactions in an import you’ll have to fix them all, while if you’d broken the import into smaller chunks the matcher will start matching them correctly after a few imports.

If you’re really that impatient, turn off the Bayesian matcher. The simple matcher trains and retrains much more quickly, though
it doesn’t work as well if the imported description isn’t consistent.

There’s no way to turn of matching entirely, and if you don’t fix its wrong matches in the match window then you have to hunt them down afterwards, which is usually a lot more time consuming. Only the ones the matcher doesn’t match go to Imbalance, not the ones it matches incorrectly.

Regards,
John Ralls