[GNC] importing csv and negative numbers

[davidcousens49 at gmail.com]

The difficulty is that the sign convention in a CSV file is normally determined
by the originating bank and there is no guarantee that it is what GnuCash thinks
it should be. 

Some banks will use a signed amount column to represent debits and credits,
others will provide a debit column and a credit column with an unsigned amount.
Most will use a convention where the file is prepared from there point of view,
i.e. deposits you make into the account will be credits and withdrawals from the
bank account will be debits in the file (and on the statement) but there are
always the banks who try to be helpful.

The importer has to be able to handle these combinations and any reversal of the
sign convention so there is some arbitrarinesss to the assignment of the Deposit
and Withdrawal headers to the appropriate columns in the CSV file in the
importer setup.

My bank uses a single signed amount column in which positive amounts are credits
on the statement and negative amounts are debits on the statement. Because the
statement is written from the banks accounting perspective and not yours the
positive amounts become debits and the negative amounts credits in your accounts
in GnuCash so I can assign the Deposit header to the single amount column in the
CSV file and it imports correctly. If I am importing a Credit card statement,
assigning the "Deposit" header also seems to work as GnuCash realizes it is
importing to a liability and not an asset account. If your bank follows the same
convention and has two columns you would assign the "Deposit" header to the
Credit column in the file and the "Withdrawal" header to the Debit column in the
file.

The best bet is to truncate a file to a couple of transactions and experiment to
get the setup right and then use that to import the complete file. Then if it
imports incorrectly you only have 1-2 transactions to delete before try the
other options.

David Cousens

On Mon, 2022-06-13 at 05:00 +0000, Kevin T via gnucash-user wrote:
> It seems that when importing CSV files, to a CC account, if the 'credit'
> column, which when imported is called the 'deposit' field, has a negative
> value in it, it is imported as a 'debit' transaction.  I have to refer to the
> statement, to find which of these transactions are supposed to be credits. 
>  IE i can't trust the import.
> is there any way to work around this behavior.
> Kevin
> _______________________________________________
> gnucash-user mailing list
> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe:
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
> If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see 
> https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information.
> -----
> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.