[GNC] CSV Importer - Single amount column

[Geert Janssens]

Op maandag 19 november 2018 08:30:21 CET schreef David Cousens:
> My bank has a  CSV format with a data column, an amount column , a
> description then a balance column and finally an expense category. The
> amount column is negative for withdrawals and positive for deposits.
> 
> When I tried to import the data with the currency set to Locale (the
> default) and the amount column set as Withdrawal,
Isn't that backwards ?

You write above that positive amounts are deposits. So I would think the 
amount column should be marked "Deposit".

"Deposit" for gnucash means: positive numbers are deposit, negative numbers 
are withdrawal. "Withdrawal" reverts this meaning.

I don't think those are very good terms to describe this. They have been like 
that in the past and while rewriting the importer I meant to review this, but 
forgot in the end. If you can propose words or very short phrases that express 
this well, I love to hear them.

So to be clear,
currently to import                              one should mark the column as
- a positive amount as deposit            deposit
- a negative amount as withdrawal     deposit
- a negative amount as deposit           withdrawal
- a positive amount as withdrawal       withdrawal

At some point I considered "Amount" and "Inverted Amount", but I was hoping 
for something even more clear.

> the importer did not
> recognise the positive quantities as withdrawls and markde them as errors. I
> played a bit with the other settings and by setting the currency to a
> period as the separator and with a comma as a thousands indicator, the
> importer then recognized all the transactions in the file and imported them
> correctly.

Do your positive amounts have "+" signs in front of them ? If so I fixed this 
issue yesterday.

> 
> As this behavior is not exactly intuitive, I thought it was worth posting to
> help anyone else trying to use the CSV importer who may encounter a similar
> problem.
> 
> I don't  normally use the CSV importer as my bank also has a correctly
> formatted OFX export which works. I was experimenting with it to try and
> find a way of dealing with importing CSV output from my PayPal account.
> However still no luck with that without extensive editing in LibreOffice
> Calc before re-exporting the modified CSV.

What editing do you have to do ?

Geert