[GNC] OFX Import with Investment Transactions

Sun Oct 3 12:43:50 EDT 2021

I believe your issue falls in the part of those libofx changes that were made. Are those nine transactions versus one in the same account or different account in same file? 

There are multiple way to hash this and thus finding the issue: singe account or multiple accounts in same ofx file (even how they are constructed matters – similar to two fully ofx files concat’ed together version versus one session with two accounts in one file) –by- cash only transactions, cash and security transactions or security transactions only -by-  security/mutual fund account or non-security/non-mutual fund account. From what I can tell various combos of these fails to work properly, sadly. I didn’t keep the list of use cases validated around but I just fell back to earlier version (4.4) that has been working fine so far for all those use cases.

From: Robin Chattopadhyay <robinraymn at gmail.com> 
Sent: Sunday, October 03, 2021 12:19 PM
To: Kalpesh Patel <kalpesh.patel at usa.net>
Cc: Gnucash Users <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
Subject: Re: [GNC] OFX Import with Investment Transactions

Yes, I'm familiar with that issue as well as my spouse's 401K OFX has fee transactions where shares are sold to pay plan expenses, but those transactions appear only as cash withdrawals and the sale transactions do not get imported.

That one doesn't bother me as much because it's one transaction per month vs 9 every two weeks.

On Sun, Oct 3, 2021 at 11:04 AM Kalpesh Patel <kalpesh.patel at usa.net <mailto:kalpesh.patel at usa.net> > wrote:

The issues that you are seeing I believe has to do with changes that OFX
introduced in libofx which has been included since 4.5 and above version of
GnuCash. FWIW, I am running on Windows 10 Pro desktop but that likely
doesn't matter when it comes to core functionality.

I also had problems where some of transactions would not get imported in
from an OFX file and these transactions I deduced from trial and error are
specifically if they are related to deposit and withdrawal of cash in Stock
or Mutual Fund account. I am not sure if this is the behavior on your end or
not but it sounds like it. This might be because libofx author may have
changed philosophy and its implementation where cash in and out are not
considered investment transactions such as buy and sell of a stock, bond,
mutual fund, etc.

Because of that I have stayed at GnuCash 4.4 (specifically Build ID:
4.4+(2020-12-28) for Windows) which I have known to properly import
brokerage created OFX files for import. I've reached out to the author of
libofx for understanding and I am still waiting to hear back from them. 

It may be worth a shot to install that version and see if it imports OFX
correctly. If you have a blank file then it should ask for appropriate input
via dialogue box such as creation of "securities", corresponding "brokerage"
account, etc. You can then go back and edit those "security" and enable
download of prices using Finance::Quote Perl module with yahoo_jason as the
source for it if you want to automate it.

For FWIW, GnuCash 4.5 on windows used to crash when 'Actions' --> 'Check &
Repair' --> 'Check & Repair All' would be selected to run which I do now and
then to make sure that my xml based file is in good shape (this is carry
over habit from Quicken as it was known to corrupt files).

This may not be the answer you are looking for but hope this helps a bit.

Kalpesh...

------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2021 10:58:44 -0500
From: Robin Chattopadhyay <robinraymn at gmail.com <mailto:robinraymn at gmail.com> >
To: Gnucash Users <gnucash-user at gnucash.org <mailto:gnucash-user at gnucash.org> >
Subject: [GNC] OFX Import with Investment Transactions
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Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (VMWare virtual machine in case that matters) Gnucash 4.8
libofx 0.9.15

I tried importing an OFX file from my 401K provider this morning and I got a
message box that said it had imported 2 transactions for a single security
in the file and there were no additional transactions to process.
This was incorrect as there were 18 new transactions across nine securities
(along with a number of other transactions that had already been imported
previously).

I tried a number of things to resolve (after taking a backup, of course):
1 - Tools > Import Map Editor and deleted all of the associations for this
file. When I re-imported, I was prompted to map each security in the file to
the correct account. No issues there. But when importing the OFX file again,
I had the same experience as described above
2 - Created a blank file and attempted to import the file there. Through the
import process, I created new securities and new accounts, nothing
unexpected there. Then the generic transaction importer dialog popped up,
but with just the two transactions for the same security cited in the
original problem dialog. I imported those, clicked OK and then the generic
transaction importer dialog came up *again* but only with transactions for a
single, different security. I imported those and repeated the process for
each security with transactions in the file. Each time the generic
transaction importer dialog came up, it only had transactions for a single
security. This is definitely new behavior that I didn't see in 4.6.
Previously the import dialog had all the new transactions in the file
3 - Reverted to 4.7. Crashed when selecting Import from the File menu
(Trace/breakpoint trap (core dumped). Not unexpected, but thought I would
try anyway.
4 - Reverted to 4.6. This works as it used to with all the new transactions
in a single dialog

Finally, I don't know if this matters, but I scanned stdout from the
build/make/install process to see if anything looked obviously wrong and I
found this (I don't know if it's relevant):

-- Performing Test HAVE_OFX_BUG_39
-- Performing Test HAVE_OFX_BUG_39 - Failed

Thanks,
Robin