How to assign transaction to accounts automatically.

[John Ralls]

> On Feb 20, 2018, at 4:39 AM, Hans Deragon <hans at deragon.biz> wrote:
> 
> Greetings,
> 
> New user here.  I downloaded 500 transactions from my credit card bank
> site, all assigned to 'Imbalanced-CAD'.  Now, how can I set rules to
> automatically assign transactions to a specific account?  For instance,
> any transaction with "^ESSO.*" or "^SHELL.*" must be reassigned to
> Car:Gasoline.  I fail to find that information on the web, except that
> when importing, GnuCash trains itself and does that automatically at the
> next import.
> 
> But what about my 500 transactions that are already imported?  What
> about if one wants to reassign transactions to another account, after a
> month of careful thinking?  Does a user have to go through all
> transactions manually?
> 
> As a workaround, is it possible to convert the GnuCash file into Unicode
> and use scripting languages to manipulate the transactions, then convert
> it back to its binary format?
> 
> Using GnuCash 2.6.12 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

No, GnuCash does not train itself: You have to train it. You do that by assigning the transactions to accounts during import. That’s what that dialog with all of the yellow was about. Your best course of action is to go to the backup from before the import and start over.

Otherwise, yes, the only way to change transactions is one-at-a-time. You can speed it up a bit using the Edit>Find to select a group of transactions that you want to change to a particular. You’ll get a editable register and you can just go down the list changing each transfer account.

Regards,
John Ralls