Importing bank transactions, gnuCash 2.6

[Edward Doolittle]

I did the same thing when I started using gnucash (which was some time
ago). I wanted as much historical information as I could get (without
entering it from paper), which turned out to be one year from all my bank
accounts and credit cards. IIRC I used QIF input format and imported one
month at a time. I did all the imports for January, then all the imports
for February, etc. The most important thing is to grab all the data from
the banks, etc., before another month disappears. You also need to gather
paper records to fill in some blanks. Once you have all the data, in chunks
of one month at a time, you can proceed.

IIRC the importer uses Bayesian matching to determine the other leg of the
transaction. At first, it doesn't know anything, but by the second month,
it was guessing the other side most of the time. You have to help it if the
transaction shows up in red, and you should double check if the transaction
shows up in yellow.

I still had to enter some transactions by hand, I forget why. Probably
because there was no download available for the dates in question.  (I
started entering data from the month of January.) And I think my investment
accounts and loans didn't have the download option, so I had to do a lot of
manual work with them. And my cash transactions were largely a mystery ...
I just guessed the dates on which I had less than $10 cash on me and
created a "writedown" transaction to send the cash to
Expenses:Miscellaneous. (Since then I've decided to minimize my use of
cash, so I don't have that problem any more.)

After completing the importing process, I then went back and used the paper
records to reconcile my accounts month by month. That doesn't really do
anything (both the downloaded data and the paper data come from the bank,
so are already in agreement) but it was helpful for me as a learning
experience. On the other hand, the reconciliation step was quite rapid,
with no discrepancies, of course.

The whole process, from organizing my paper records and downloading data
files, to a fairly complete picture of my past year in personal finances,
took about a week of evenings. The process was relatively painless and was
quite rewarding in the end. I had minor corrections to make for quite some
time after that initial week, mostly as I learned more about double entry
accounting and accounting treatments for various types of transactions. I
occasionally still make corrections and modifications even now, though of
course that's a bad idea where there are more formal accounting
requirements.

It's easy to make corrections, except that it is difficult to separate two
types of transactions, for example, that have ended up in the same account.
(E.g., if you put fast food and fine dining together in one expense
account, and later decide to split them into separate subaccounts, it could
be a lot of work. But combining subaccounts is easy. So my advice would be
to separate as much as possible in the initial data entry; make lots of
accounts and subaccounts in your chart of accounts.)

On 19 April 2017 at 19:25, dave boland <dboland9 at fastmail.fm> wrote:

> I need a plan to import about a year's worth of bank transactions into
> gnuCash.  The user's bank can do many different file formats, so the
> first question is which one is best?  Keep in mind that the data is
> simply:
>
> Transaction  Transaction  Check
> Date         Type*        No.    Description**  Credit  Debit  Balance
> -----------  -----------  ------ -------------  -----  ------- -------
>
> * Deposit, Withdrawal, Check, Purchase, Fee
> ** Only for purchases using the bank card, or ATM address
>
> There is no receiving account (Expenses:Grocery for example).
>
> What is the procedure to import the transactions?  I get that
> File/Import is used, but I'm more interested in how the transactions are
> matched to the receiving account.  Will this also 'R' the transaction?
>
> I went through Help, but found nothing (Hint Hint).  Googling didn't get
> me the help I want either.
>
> Thanks,
> Dave
> --
>   dave boland
>   dboland9 at fastmail.fm
>
> --
> http://www.fastmail.com - Or how I learned to stop worrying and
>                           love email again
>
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-- 
Edward Doolittle
Associate Professor of Mathematics
First Nations University of Canada
1 First Nations Way, Regina SK S4S 7K2

« Toutes les fois que je donne une place vacante, je fais cent mécontents
et un ingrat. »
-- Louis XIV, dans Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV, Chap. XXVI