[GNC] Regularly importing transactions from CSV files

[Adrien Monteleone]

Welcome to GnuCash!

When you do the import, all of those transactions should have one 
account the same, for whatever you are importing from, say, a bank 
account. You then assign the 'other' account for each transaction. 
(expenses, paying liabilities, income, etc.)

Check out the Help Guide & the Concepts & Tutorial documents from the 
GnuCash website. (under Documentation)

Yes, you can 'move' transactions by simply re-assigning accounts after 
the import, but it is better to get it right during the import as that 
is how the matcher learns your transactions. (so you don't have to do as 
much work on subsequent imports)

On that note, be sure to break up the import into smaller chunks like 
monthly. This way, you get the time saving benefits of training the 
import matcher with successive imports, and you break down the work 
load, as well as decrease your chances of errors.

As for swapping credit/debit, you can cut/paste the values of course, 
but you can also just put a minus sign in front of an amount and GnuCash 
will swap the value to the other column. (a 'negative debit' *is* a 
credit and vice versa)

Regards,
Adrien

On 7/24/22 4:26 PM, Mateja Maric via gnucash-user wrote:
> Hello everybody,
> 
> I found out about GnuCash (and double-entry accounting) three days ago 
> and I want to use it to track my spending...
> My bank allows me to export my transaction history to a CSV file.
> I plan to use that feature regularly and import transactions into GnuCash.
> Here's how my bank's CSV file looks like:
> ```
> Date made;   Date finished;   Withdrawn;   Deposited;  Balance; Description
> 2.2.2022.;     4.2.2022.;         200; 0;                12800; Pizza 
> paid by a debit card
> 15.1.2022.;   16.1.2022.;       2000;            0; 13000;      ATM Cash 
> Withdrawn
> 2.1.2022.;      2.1.2022.;        0; 15000;        15000;      Salary 
> received
> ```
> Of course this is just an example and I actually have hundreds of 
> transactions that I have to import from a single file.
> I'm using a "A Simple Checkbook" account hierarchy and I'm having 
> trouble putting transactions into appropriate accounts. What should be 
> my base account when importing transactions? Also can I move 
> transactions from one account to another and can I switch debit and 
> credit fields of multiple transactions (because I already managed to 
> mess up their order)?