[GNC] Import issue

[Gyle McCollam]

Thank you Kalpesh, the last paragraph of your response was just what I was looking for, a way to match an existing transaction with the import line.


Thank You,

Gyle McCollam

Gyle McCollam

gmccollam at live.com<mailto:gmccollam at gyleshomes.com>           email

________________________________
From: Kalpesh Patel <kalpesh.patel at usa.net>
Sent: Monday, December 18, 2023 11:13 AM
To: 'Gyle McCollam' <gmccollam at live.com>
Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
Subject: RE: [GNC] Import issue

After spending some time looking at downloaded data, I've noticed that, sadly, a lot of banks and credit card companies are now appending dates in the far right to the description of the actual transactions which makes them very hard to zero in as a match when imported. You'll need to play around with the import settings via 'Edit' -> 'Preferences' -> 'Import' to adjust so that it matches more transactions then not. I also now and then purge out prior learned matches for a specific account so the algorithm can relearn again.

Keep in mind that there is no requirements for financial institutions to describe same transaction same way in a bill nor there are any collaborations amongst financial institutions to standardize them. Credit card companies are notorious for this kinds of shenanigan, perhaps rightfully so as they try to "pass-through" that info that third parties provide who are the actual executors of the transactions (ex: a customer of Walmart places an online order and pays by PayPal account which is backed by a BofA Credit Card who issues the bill; those intermediaries can fudge it anyway they like). This is where our help comes in to train them ... aka manual match.

Another thing to keep in mind is how the quality of the data and how data is formatted for the import. More often than not a space(s) prefixing and/or suffixing the numeric value gets to be evaluated as a string, thus consequentially failing to match against a numeric value. I haven't looked at the GNC code so not sure what tactical GNC takes to normalize but this possibility is there so throwing it out there. (This is why in CSV, you don’t want to enclose numeric value in a single or double quotes)

While the automatic matches may not be concurred by GNC due to variety of the reasons, you always can manually match it, whether transaction is reconciled or not. This can only help improve the matcher algorithm. I've always seen 'Generic import transaction matcher' window pop up just before accepting them which gives me an opportunity to manually match it if it failed to match it or match is incorrect one. You'll need to set the transaction as either 'U+C' or 'C' and then double-clicking that transaction will bring up 'Select matching existing transaction' window where you can set the correct match.

-----Original Message-----
From: David Carlson <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, December 17, 2023 11:01 PM
To: Gyle McCollam <gmccollam at live.com>
Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Subject: Re: [GNC] Import issue

Gyle,

I have sometimes had GnuCash fail to match transactions with equal amounts and dates.  I do not know why but I suspect either there is insufficient matching text in the description or there is a different reason blocking the match.  In those cases I just import the transaction unmatched, but It would be nice to have a way to force those matches.



On Tue, Dec 12, 2023 at 5:51 PM Gyle McCollam <gmccollam at live.com> wrote:

> I'm importing a credit card statement and matching to transactions
> already entered.  I have a transaction recorded on 11/08/2023 that was
> processed by the credit card company on 11/12/2023, 4 days later.  It
> is not matching with the entered transaction even though the amount is
> identical.  I've looked at the preferences for importing and attached
> a screenshot.  I don't know what I'm doing wrong.  Is there a way to
> select the item in the import screen and tell it to match to the 11/08/2023 transaction?
>
>
> Thank You,
>
> Gyle McCollam
>
> Gyle McCollam
>
> gmccollam at live.com<mailto:gmccollam at gyleshomes.com>           email
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--
David Carlson