bulk operations?

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 5/6/2017 11:07 PM, Eric Theise wrote:
> For lack of a better name.
>
> Suppose I'm in the "Search Results" window resulting from an "Edit >
> Find..." operation. Is there any way to apply a change to every transaction
> that appears?
>
> Say that, due to history and multiple credit card accounts, a grocer's
> Description appears as "HI HO", "hi ho grocery", "hi-ho market", and
> permutations thereof. Is there any way to standardize the name for
> everything in the result set besides manually changing each line?
leave the next aside for the moment
> I'd also like to be able to perform bulk operations against "Imbalance-USD"
> transactions.

> If it's not possible through the GUI, how about via issuing SQL statements
> to a database backend?

Possible, yes, practical, no. Look, in the shop where I used to work, 
hundreds of programmers (one of the world's largest "financials") I 
would estimate that less than 10% of us competent to take on such a 
task. By which I don't mean just writing the program but correctly 
devising the commands that program would use << and THIS part of it 
would devolve on the "users" >> Even rarer in the shop those of us who 
could take on the really tricky stuff, perhaps could count those on the 
fingers of one hand.

Thus because I have done things like populating an SQL database (even 
adding tables to it that didn't exist before) and doing that OUTSIDE of 
SQL << by changing the flat backup file and reloading from backup >> I 
have to say POSSIBLE. But that"possible" means for a very experienced 
and tricky senior analyst, not a user. What you are asking for is along 
the lines of an advanced "alpha index" program << a program that can 
look at names entered free form and decide "that's the same person, make 
the name match a common format". Very few of us in the shop were 
competent to work on the "alpha index" programs < or to debug them when 
they were screwing up with some names >

Michael D Novack

PS: Now back to your questions about "Imbalance". There is no general 
way to determine exactly what was wrong with the transaction as entered 
that resulted in an entry in Imbalance or how to correct that. For 
example, if I see an entry there, the other side of the transaction 
being a credit to the checking account, there is no way to know WHAT 
that check was for. You have to look at other documentation (perhaps the 
memo line on the check, a description in your check book, etc.) to know 
how to correct that transaction. Can't automate that.