[GNC] Suggestion to ease newbies import problems

[David Cousens]

Thanks for the feedback. I am currently rewriting part of the documentation
in the Help manual on importing. The comments about Base, Destination and
transfer accounts are quite timely and I have struggled with  that
terminology while doing the rewrite.

The difficulty arises primarily because in accounting terms there  is really
no difference in the accounts associated with the various splits in a
transaction. Which is the base/source account and which is the transfer or
destination account is really determined by which register you are viewing
the transaction from and/or into which account/register you are importing
the transactions.  There is an inherent ambiguity that can be difficult to
describe in all circumstances.

The "minimum to import data" is actually correct in that a csv file must at
least contain those columns for data to be imported at all. GnuCash or the
user can assign the destination account. It is not necessary, although
certainly desirable to dhave the destination account specified in the input
file. Unfortunately GnuCash is not the origin of most files to be imported
and as these are from banks and other institutions in the main, the
terminalogy used is optimal for their needs and not really for GnuCash
specifically. Your point about adding and populating a destination account
column before importing.  This of course presumes one has a fully populated
CoA setup before starting to import.  

One of the reasons for the recommended procedure of initially importing in
small batches is to at least get the core of  the CoA setup and to at least
partially train the Bayesian matcher before importing the bulk of the data.
The Bayesian matcher only derives its data from the import process and does
not use any information about existing transaction account assignments
already present in Gnucash.

I have expanded the description of the import matcher considerably. The Help
manual is oriented more towards a description of the interfaces. In some of
Geert' more recent improvements the dialogs lead you through the process
fairly effectively so a guide section almost becomes redundant.  I am
planning on adding sections to the guide illustrating the import process in
more detail for a few example cases , particularly the CSV import(minimal
import, multiline multisplit data, GnuCash exported data( simple layout and
multiline), stock and currency) where the format is not constrained by any
standard. Flexibility has its price unfortunately.

One of the perennial problems is terminology. If you come from another
program or even from a general accounting background  the previous use of
terms within another context can make it difficult to interpret the help and
guide, at least initially. A glossary was fairly recently added to the
Tutorial and Concepts Guide by @sunfish62. Unfortunately this simply puts
the header information from the glossary up in the popup and not the
definition part in the current DocBooks implementation. It is possible to
open the glossary in another tab however.  I hope to make the glossary
common to both the guide and the help manual in the future and I hope this
will go a long way to settling problems re slightly different usage of
terminology in different places in the guide and help manuals.

These changes probably won't be in the guide and help manual until V4 comes
out. Some parts are currently being reviewed.

David Cousens



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David Cousens
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