[GNC] Learning relate Gnucash to bank in 3-letter anagram world

[David Cousens]

Johnathon,

What facilities exist with your bank for automated transaction download will
to some extent depend upon your bank and what standards they have adopted
for communication with their customers. 

Most banks should at least use the Open Financial Exchange (OFX) protocol
either as a file you can download and import into OFX. Some banks will
support a program logging in to a portal automatically and directly
importing transactions using the same OFX protocol or using the interface
that was largely developd in European Banks. 

OFX is in turn an example of an XML (eXtensible Markup Language) which used
tags of the format 
<ACCOUNT>Saving Account</ACCOUNT> 
to enclose and identify the type of the datawithin the tags. In OFX the tags
associated with finacial data have a specified meaning.  If you Google
search for these acronyms you will turn up their definitions and
specifications usually on a site with a .org suffix.

Some banks will also offer financial data in other formats such as QIF
(Quicken Interchange Format) which is a proprietary format for Quicken
programs but also widely used by others or QFX which is a Quicken version of
the OFX protocol. QFX files can be imported with the "Import OFX" menu entry
as they are essentially the same format.

Another tabular format offered is CSV (Comma Separated Values) which
originated with spreadshett data, E.g. Microsoft Excel although it  predated
Excel (IBM 360 Fortran around 1972 I believe).

My bank only allows on-line access via their website and an authorized logon
to that site, not directaccess at present. I can the export selected data
for a given date range inany of OFX/QFX, QIF, MSMoney orCSV formats. Once
downloaded to my computer I import the OFX files into GnuCash and check for
any transactions which were not made by me usually while importing them and
assigning the Expense accounts or Income accounts associated with the
transaction to my bank account.

You may need to read some introductory material on double entry accounting
in general and as it is implemented in Gnucash. Wikipedia has some very good
explanantions of double entry accounting (see their headings Double Entry
Accounting, Accounting Equation, Debits and Credits for example. You will
also find other information sources on line. The GnuCash Tuorial and
Concepts guide is a good point to start with GNuCash specific information
https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v3/C/gnucash-guide/index.html

David Cousens





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David Cousens
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