Bayes Matching / Updating Help

[Evan Van Dyke]

I’ve been using GnuCash for five or six years now, and by and large it works very well for me.  The one thing that I still find somewhat annoying is poor baysean matching of imported transactions to scheduled ones on my credit cards.  Maybe 80-85% of everything matches perfectly, but there are a few items which seem to never match.   Typical example is my water/storm/garbage bill.  It tends to vary by +/- $10 every month.  The Bayes filter almost never matches it (due to the price variance I assume), and the “right” one doesn’t show up in the manual match list if I try to match manually (minimum to display currently set at 1).  Often I’ll get some other transaction in the list which has a closer price, but wrong description/text.   Usually that other transaction was matched by Bayes to some other transaction in the import, which is extra frustrating; You can’t reconcile 2 imported transactions to the same scheduled one!

Similar issue with my contributions to college savings plans for 2 children.  Same price, only difference is the account# in the description field.  Bayes /always/ matches both incoming transactions to the lexically-sorted first one of the 2 scheduled Tx in my register.

Looking for some way to force-train the bayes DB better:
   - Temporarily lower the filter enough for the right transaction to show up
   - Have Bayes re-match when I do something like set the proper expense account for the new transaction
   - Some way to “force match” the two transactions after the initial import (and kill the duplicate)
   - Figure out how to update my scheduled Transaction so it’ll show up “above the line” and I can select it.

Open to any ideas/guidance.    I see from the release notes that 3.0 is supposed to have new/better Bayes support; will that help me resolve this?

Thanks for any/all assistance!

—Evan