[GNC] Import Transactions via CSV including transfer accounts

[Justin H Haynes]

I suppose another approach might be to concatenate the description with the category, separated by a space, and just allow the algorithm, to learn.

> On Sep 15, 2018, at 8:27 AM, Justin H Haynes <justin at justinhaynes.com> wrote:
> 
> One bank I use allows me to customize a set of Categories.  The categories can have hierarchy denoted with “/“.  There is a facility for static mapping of text found in the description and the categories.
> 
> I would like to create categories at the bank which will match the accounts in GNUCash.  In this way, I can do a simple search and replace in a spreadsheet program to convert “/“ to “:”, and also to prepend accounts with, for example, “Liabilities:” or “Expenses:”.  The whole operation from export, to search and replace, to exporting back to csv from a spreadsheet would take less than a minute.
> 
> What does the “Import Transactions from CSV” wizard expect of the contents of fields to which one maps “Account”?  Does it expect the full literal text representing the account as I have implied in my search and replace?   For example, if Date, Description and Deposit fields are defined, and the Account information in the csv is “Expenses:Coffee:Equipment and Maintenance”, will this be the account specified in the imported transaction?
> 
> Secondly, if the “Import Transactions from CSV” wizard does expect the account in this way, will the Bayesian learning be applied to the transaction so that it can benefit from the mapping and learn from the transactions?  My guess is that it would not, because I would expect the transactions to behave as if they were manually specified.  However, I think it would be useful to allow it to learn from this import, because I will not always import transactions in this way.  In other words, I will likely import a few transactions every day so that I can more easily keep up with bookkeeping.  In this case, the algorithm can benefit from a massive import when, say, I catch up my books *before* the opening date to extend them further into the past and do all the reconciliation needed to make that happen.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Justin
> 
> 
>