[GNC] CVS import over-writing transactions?

[David Cousens]

David,

The Import Matcher works by matching tokens in the Description amount date
fileds( not sure about the memo fields on individual splitsand assigns an action
( the checkboxes in the Import Matcher dialogue. It can choose to Import a
transaction as new (A), Update an existing matching transaction if the
transaction to be imported closely matches an existing transaction or to not
import a transaction at all (R or C dependng on version) but will mark the
transaction as cleared. Only one of these checkboxes can be selected for a given
transaction. The matcher has threshold levels for a match for each action which
can be set in the user preferences. It is likely the similarities in your tags
and the use of the "-" which I think the tokenizer recognizes as a separator,
means that there is enough similarity (the amount, other words in the descrption
and components of the tag and date), that the matcher generates a high enough
score to match as an Update rather than as a new import. 

You can try adjusting the threshold settings (can be difficult to get right)
increasing the match level required for an update or go through the imported
data and manually or change the checkboxes which are marked as either (U)pdate
or (C)leared to (A)dd in the Import Matcher dialogue if they have been
incorrectly matched to an existing transaction.  The dialogue also allows you to
display the transactions which have been matched to a transaction being imported
so you can check the detail on which it is being matched.(Usually a left mouse
click on a row containing a "C" box checked).

David Cousens

 
On Wed, 2023-03-15 at 07:48 +0000, david whiting wrote:
> OS: Linux (NixOS)
> Gnucash: 4.12 Build ID: 4.12+(2022-09-24)
> Backend: sqlite
> 
> This is a weird one, and I can't work out if it's me or gnucash. I import
> transactions from a cvs export from my bank. I check the date of the last
> transaction that I have imported and truncate the csv file so that I'm only
> importing new transactions.
> 
> After the import, usually, but not always, I check to make sure that the
> ending balance on the bank account matches that in gnucash. A couple of
> times I have found that it isn't and I check through each date to see where
> I have missed a transaction. When this has happened I have assumed that I
> truncated the import file incorrectly. I then manually add the missing
> transaction(s).
> 
> I'm using gnucash for a local football club. At the moment we are taking
> payments for a tournament that we are organising and for these transactions
> I have been writing a number in the num column. Each number is unique and
> identifies the team that has registered (it has the row number from the
> separate registration database and the age group). When I did an import
> today, I found that some transactions were missing again and so I started
> to enter them; then I noticed that some of the new transactions that I had
> imported already had numbers in the num column, but the numbers related to
> the teams where the transactions were missing.
> 
> See attached screenshot. This shows a transaction on 14/03/2023 where the
> number is T-25-U8 but the reference contains T-89-VETS, and similarly for
> the transaction below it. The T-25-U8 payment was made on 01/03/2023 (1
> March 23), but was missing after the import. The transaction with T-89-VETS
> in the reference shouldn't have had a number yet, as I hadn't entered it.
> This looks like the transaction with T-89-VETS has overwritten the T-25-U8
> transaction, except for the num.
> 
> I make daily backups, so I looked at a backup from a couple of days ago and
> the original T-25-U8 transaction on 01/03/23 (1 March 23) was there. So it
> looks like the cvs import sometimes overwrites some transactions.
> 
> I have looked at https://bugs.gnucash.org/ for bugs with the word "import"
> covering the last year and can't see anything that looks like this and I
> have checked the release notes for 4.13 and see no mention of a bug fix for
> something like this.
> 
> Has anyone else seen anything like this? Is there anything I could be doing
> wrong when importing the csv file?
> 
> David
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