[GNC] Can I Prevent OFX/QFX Import Overwriting Notes?

[gcul209 at mynym.us]

I'm afraid my notes are not generic enough for that.  My notes are 
literally the name and location of the purchase, which could be any shop 
in any city or any website. Generally, the bank statement will have good 
enough information, but there are a lot of locations that use Square, 
for instance, and then losing the note may obscure the place of 
purchase. Creating an account for every location I've ever purchased 
anything from might provide some interesting insights, but I should 
think those could be obtained with reporting outside of such a complex 
account structure.

On 8/27/21 1:24 PM, Kalpesh Patel wrote:
>
> I’ve established a bit of a different workflow. I “convert” what would 
> have been the note into a very specific sub-account so that no matter 
> what the note’s information doesn’t get lost. For example if I paid 
> for a gift via check for xyz then I will create a sub account of xyz 
> under gifts (Expenses:Gifts:XYZ) if I want to track it for that 
> specific person but if not I can always assign the expense category of 
> gifts (Expenses:Gifts) as a more general way. This way those notes 
> shows up correctly in the report too. Far as I know, there is no limit 
> how deep of nest it can be in such fashion.
>
> If the enhancement were to come, it would be great since I have 
> accounts on both side of the transactions that get downloaded via OFX 
> so I can cross reference them, for example check number 123 from a 
> bank on one side and as note for credit card payment on the second 
> side, while display description can say something a bit about 
> transaction like CC Charges payment.
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
>
> Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2021 16:55:35 -0400
>
> From: gcul209 at mynym.us <mailto:gcul209 at mynym.us>
>
> To: "gnucash-user at gnucash.org <mailto:gnucash-user at gnucash.org>" 
> <gnucash-user at gnucash.org <mailto:gnucash-user at gnucash.org>>
>
> Subject: [GNC] Can I Prevent OFX/QFX Import Overwriting Notes?
>
> Message-ID: <1ba8c2d0-0b20-42dc-bcbf-5946e6173e03 at mynym.us 
> <mailto:1ba8c2d0-0b20-42dc-bcbf-5946e6173e03 at mynym.us>>
>
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>
> I wouldn't be surprised if this has been asked in the past, but I 
> don't know of a good way to search the archives for these mailing 
> lists (seems I'd have to download a month at a time in order to search 
> manually).  I also wouldn't be surprised if the answer is blatantly 
> obvious / right in front of me and I'm just missing it.  I did try an 
> Internet search and got too many irrelevant results (outside of the 
> manual and basic import information, which I did look through a bit, 
> without much luck).
>
> I recently migrated from an old PC to a new Mac.  As far as I can 
> tell, I was running GnuCash 2.6.16-1 on the PC (I don't remember why I 
> stopped updating), but I figured I should upgrade during the 
> transition, so I'm running 4.6-1 on the Mac.  I have always downloaded 
> OFX and/or QFX files from my banks in order to reconcile my manual 
> entries and import additional transaction data (using U+C to complete 
> my register).  For the manual entries, I have always used the notes 
> field in the register for most of my bank accounts because there's 
> typically nothing worth importing there anyway (just something like 
> "OFX ext. info: |Trans type:Generic debit").  Previously, on the PC, 
> my manually entered notes were NOT overwritten.  Now that I'm on the 
> Mac, the notes are being overwritten by that arcane data, but I don't 
> know if that is a PC vs Mac thing or a version change thing.  I also 
> don't know if there is anything I can do to prevent it in either 
> case.  What I do know is that the behavior is consistent across file 
> types and banks (I ignored it the first time it happened because I 
> didn't want to re-enter a bunch of previous transactions in order to 
> try to work around it, but I was expecting it this time, with a 
> different bank providing the data, and confirmed it happens for both 
> formats).
>
> I don't really want to lose my manually entered data, but I would like 
> to have the bank data imported an synchronized as well.  Is there 
> anything I can do so that the generic transaction information doesn't 
> overwrite my previously entered notes?
>
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>