Using Online Banking features

[David Reiser]

> On Feb 23, 2018, at 5:32 PM, Ron Schnatzmeyer <NoSoy1 at charter.net> wrote:
> 
> I've just set up GnuCash (Linux). I have all my accounts set up (a lot of work). I have moved over all the data from Quicken (a lot more work) and everything balances. I have gone through the online banking setup and can connect to my bank just fine. The setup recognized the three accounts I have this bank and I associated them to the corresponding GnuCash accounts. But I'm excited and confused. It seems there is quite a bit of information about setting up online banking but hardly anything on how to actually use it. When I read GnuCash has online banking my expectation is that it would work similar to Quicken?
> 
> So here I am just starting to use GnuCash:
> 
> 1) Now I want to send several bill payments to the bank. With Q, I setup the online payees first and then just put 'send' in the check number to make a payment. What do I do in GnuCash? How do I make payments?

The only banks from which you can make payments from within GnuCash are German banks. Quicken has no interest in working with open source developers to enable open source utilities to work with Quicken servers. While some small commercial ‘competitors’ to Quicken have enabled online payments, the fees to Quicken and liability risks to developers from customer complaints are prohibitive.

> 
> 2) I have three separate accounts at the same bank. With Q, I just just click on "Ron's Bank". It then downloads all the transactions and sends all the payments for all three accounts at one time. How do I do that with GnuCash?

I don’t think you can do this in Gnucash because the link between aqbanking and gnucash is bound to one account at a time. I’m pretty sure you’ll have to visit each gnucash account in turn and download transactions from the bank repetitively. Either aqbanking only asks for transactions for one account at a time, or it is capable of sorting out the data from the download stream for the currently visible gnucash account register. It works for me with multiple Chase credit cards managed under a single online login.

> 
> 3) I have several scheduled online payments set up in Q. I set it up once and then every month it automatically pays the same amount on the scheduled date. I don't have to do anything else. How do I do that with GnuCash?

You can schedule transactions within Gnucash to record the data related to all these transactions, but you’ll have to set up the actual transactions with your financial institution or creditor for them to automatically trigger them. See the answer to #1.

> 
> I'd appreciate some help on how to use these online features.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> 

--
Dave Reiser
dbreiser at icloud.com