Transfer accounts in QIF/OFX imports

[Gomer Thomas]

I import transactions into GnuCash from my banking account with QIF 
files, and I import transactions from my charge card account with OFX 
files. In both cases, I never enter any transactions manually. The bulk 
of the bank account transactions are debit card charges. Some of them 
are checks, and I use an on-line facility of the bank to include the 
payee of a check in the description associated with the check, before I 
download the transactions.

The most time consuming part of importing is assigning the "transfer 
accounts" to the transactions (typically expense accounts for the 
different categories of expenditures). Once I have imported a few QIF 
files into GnuCash and manually assigned transfer accounts to them, 
GnuCash seems to automatically assign the correct transfer account to 
some of the transactions in later imports, but not very many of them, in 
spite of the fact that month after month quite a few of the transactions 
are charges to the same stores. After I have imported quite a few OFX 
files into GnuCash and manually assigned transfer accounts to them, 
GnuCash automatically assigns transfer accounts to almost all of the 
transactions in later imports, but all of those assignments are incorrect.

What I would like, of course, is to have GnuCash record key words from 
the description fields of transactions and associate those with the 
transfer accounts that the transactions are manually assigned to, then 
use this to automatically assign transfer accounts to future 
transactions. It might be even more useful if I could create a table 
that maps certain key words in the description of a transaction to the 
corresponding transfer account of the transaction. (The key words could 
be case sensitive or not. I could cope with them either way.)

My questions are:

    (1) Is GnuCash supposed to be able to do automatic assignment of 
transfer accounts to imported transactions, in much the same way as 
Quicken automatically assigns Categories to imported transactions?

    (2) If so, what do I need to do to get this automatic assignment to 
work correctly?

For what it is worth, "Use bayesian matching" is turned on in my 
Preferences, but I can't find any explanation of what that is supposed 
to do. Is it just attempting to detect duplicate transactions?

In a related vein, is there an explanation somewhere of what "update" 
and "reconcile" means for transactions imported via OFX?Are these terms 
only relevant when a duplicate transaction is found? Is the meaning of 
the word "reconcile" here totally independent of the "reconcile" operation?

In my case, the transaction in the credit card (Liability) account that 
represents payment of the credit card bill shows up as "R+U" -- 
presumably because it is a duplicate of the transfer transaction for the 
transaction in the (Asset) checking account that represents payment of 
the credit card bill -- but it is not clear how GnuCash knows this. All 
other transactions show up as "A", and the "Info" for almost all of them 
says "transfer to [the (Asset) checking account] -- which seems to me to 
be total nonsense. Isn't the transfer account for them an expense 
account? Isn't the credit card payment transaction the only one that 
should have the checking account as the transfer account?

Best regards, Gomer Thomas

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Gomer Thomas
9810 132nd St NE
Arlington, WA
98223-8850