CSV Import

[Geert Janssens]

On donderdag 27 april 2017 21:54:01 CEST GT-I9070 H wrote:
> Although in a smaller number, It's perfectly possible that there are
> transactions between income and expenses in all their possible combinations.
> 

Sure such transactions exist and the importer should be able to import these, 
provided the csv data is structured in a way the gnucash importer understands.

> Even if you don't have it personally, it's entirely possible that the
> assets used to pay certain expenses have been provided by more than one
> bank, credit card or others asset/liability.
> 
In double entry accounting you can look at a transaction from any account and 
consider the others as transfer accounts.

If there's at least one (and possibly more) asset/liability account involved 
in a transaction you can model the import source file such that it looks as if 
you are importing into an asset/liability account. So this particular example 
is not a motivation to be able to import income/expense accounts.

> An importer is made for everyone and not for particular cases.

While I love to agree and surely do in theory unfortunately that's not always 
true in reality for various practical reasons.

> It makes no sense to work to limit the good capabilities of an importer or
> app.

There are: time required vs available to implement and maintain the code.

To illustrate: in the bank/cc company scenario the provided data is usually 
pretty limited (date/num/description/amount) so much data needs to be guessed/
deduced. The import/export between different accounting applications or even 
between different gnucash books can potentially provide much more detail 
making life easier on the importer. So we're discussing a very broad spectrum 
of use cases with greatly varying amounts of data to start from. I don't 
expect the importer to be able to handle every possibly conceivable csv file. 
In certain cases one will need to preprocess the csv file to be able to import 
successfully. One such example is gnucash will incorrectly import negative 
numbers with a trailing negative sign [1]. This is a restriction in code I 
haven't touched (yet). If time permits I eventually will.

Regardless, as I have said before I don't think there are technical 
restrictions that should prevent the importer from being used to import 
income/expense data.

Regards,

Geert

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=778983