William I think the answer to your question lies in the fact that files users wish to import don't come from a single source and don't always conform to any well defined standard with regard to both the data format and the information supplied.
Importing OFX data is considerably more straightforward than importing CSV data for this reason, as it does conform to a reasonably well defined standard, but even then some institutions do manage to stuff it up. In most cases users don't necessarily have any control over what another institution includes in the files they supply. Most include transactions between the To and From dates inclusively that you might enter when requesting a data download but this is not guaranteed. Stupid ? Yes, but the importer has to cope with stupid, as well as nicely well formatted and thought out files. Not all data for a bank account includes the detail of which account you may want the second split of a transaction to go to and even if they do it may not match your choices in setting up your chart of accounts. If it does then GnuCash deals with that I am an accountant (retired) and I have imported the same file (or at least overlapping data in different files) on more than one occasion since I have been using GnuCash. The point of the matcher is to pick this up before you have enterd the data into your accounts and not have to deal with the far more laborious task of working out which transactions were duplicated in an import and deleting them from your records one by one once they have been imported. If you get the date format wrong relative to your locale format on an import, it can be particularly difficult. Swapping days and years produces some interesting results. The matcher also has a Bayesian learning system which can allocate the transfer account for the second split on the basis of matching information in the description and other fields. My experience has been after I have imported one or two month's data, it will generally assign the transfer account for about 60% of data in the succeeding months and handles regular payments and deposits pretty well and it gets better still after a few months. I import a few hundred transactions a month, generally in 5-10 minutes from OFX files with no problem. CSV importing (e.g. Paypal can be far more problematical but the ability of the importer in v3.2 to save import settings is a great help. There is a recent patch (Bug 796778) which might help you shorten the initial input before the matcher works efficiently but it is not yet incorporated in the master branch. It implements multiple selection of rows in the matcher e.g.. from the same vendor using Ctrl-click and Shift Click and the rubberbanding techniques implemented in GTK and the assignment of those rows to a single transfer account. It speeds up the initial import of data quite a bit but is less effective once the Bayesian matching is trained (which is possibly why it has not been implemented before now) as that tends to pick up repeated transactions fairly well. The downside is of course there is always a transaction or two from the same vendor or customer which may have to go to a different transfer account, i.e. you still have to check that it has been correctly assigned by the matcher. Keep trying. Tthe brain dead importer does get less brain dead with repeated use. David Cousens ----- David Cousens -- Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-Dev-f1435356.html _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
