[GNC] CSV Importer - Single amount column

Geert Janssens geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be
Wed Nov 21 04:36:10 EST 2018


Hi David,

I think this message could have been sent to the list instead of me 
personally. I won't edit your message in my reply so others can follow the 
conversation.

Number recognition fails indeed when number format is set to "Locale" and 
positive numbers are prefixed with a '+' sign. That's the core issue of 
https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=796919 which I fixed a few days ago.

So you can either strip it from your csv file or build a recent maint version 
and then it should work.

Regards,

Geert

Op dinsdag 20 november 2018 23:58:44 CET schreef u:
> Geert,
> 
> I'll check it out again more carefully and get back to you. My recollection
> is that it didn't matter whether I selected the amount column as "Deposit"
> or "Withdrawal" with the Currency set as "Locale", the transactions with a
> positive sign were flagged as errors.

> I did not however try to complete the
> import with the Locale setting. It was only after changing the currency
> that all the transactions were accepted without error. I will redo it with
> the amount column both as "Deposit" and "Withdrawal" with the various
> combinations of the currency setting and report what happens for each.
> > Isn't that backwards ?
> 
> That was what I thought too.
> 
> > 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.
> 
> That was also what I expected to occur
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Agreed it is difficult to come up with short adequately descriptive phrases.
> Perhaps a tooltip explaining that the column header seleceted as:
> "Deposit: means Positive amounts as Deposit and Negative amount as
> Withdrawal "Withdrawal" means Negative amounts as Deposits and Positive
> amounts as Withdrawal
> 
>  from the account
> 
> > 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
> 
> Will get back to you with tabulated results for combinations of the column
> settings and  currency settings.
> > 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.
> 
> Yes all amounts are signed with either a + or - sign.
> 
> > > 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 ?
> 
> Mainly deleting a lot of columns of irrelevant transaction information
> associated with the ecommerce aspects of the transaction that PayPal
> includes. I put in a request to them for the financial data to be output in
> OFX form but got no response at all.  I only maintain my accounts in
> GnuCash in AUD so I normally delete any rows dealing with the currency
> conversion and just add to the Description any foreign currency amount that
> was converted. Paypal's options on content and format of the exported data
> seem very limited. I intend to experiment a bit more and see if I can get a
> set of column labels which will simply allow me to ignore the irrelevant
> columns but I don't see anyway of dealing with the currency conversions
> other than deleting them. I have also not fully explored all combinations
> of Paypal's export settings as yet either.
> 
> I am presuming that the import settings stores the column header assignment
> to internal GnuCash data that would allow me to do that but have not really
> explored that at this point
> 
> > Geert
> 
> David Cousens






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