Bite, Another difficulty is that most banks currently provide statements (as distinct from OFX or CSV transactional records which are not necessarily certified by the bank to be correct) in a pdf form and not a digital form.
These are not easily imported into GnuCash for use in reconciliation procedure. At present this would require an OCR read and conversion to an appropriate digital format. Sure it is doable in principle, but the point of reconciliation is to assure yourself that the transactions have been entered/imp[orted correctly and the external and internal views of your accounts conincide. Just like the import matching process, you would then have to check that the reconciliation has automatically correctly matched every transaction. A priori, you don't know which ones it has correctly or incorrectly matched. No matching procedure is going to be perfect all of the time. It may miss a match to transactions which it should have matched and it may match to transactions it should not have. When you rely on an automated procedure, particularly when it is reliable most of the time, but maybe incorrect occasionally, you are less likely to pick up the few times when it is not correct and that is the whole point of a manual reconciliation. The current reconciliation process does not waste time on already reconciled transactions, it assumes they have been correctly reconciled up to the closing date of the last reconciled statement. Whether the developers feel this is worth doing will likely depend on banks widely adopting a digital statement format suitable for importing into GnuCash and whether they feel the coding effort is worth the productivity gains which might result. If they don't, feel free to start coding it yourself. Does your bank produce OFX statements which are certified by their accountant to be a true and correct record up to a specified date? If not there is little point in the discussion. M y bank does not provide statements in this format and AFAIK has no intention to in the forseeable future. Banks that do produce proper digital statements currently use (Europe)MT940 and/or the (US)BAI2 format On Fri, 2023-01-06 at 09:50 +0800, Bite Gao wrote: > GnuCash Developers and Maintainers: > Hello! While you have mentioned the requirement of human intervene in the > reconciliation process, I do not see it contradicts with the presence of > automatically reconciliation system. > In a reconcile process, the accountant check the record in the account book > with the record in the bank statement (or statement from other institution). > He (or she) may found out that two record are identical, or he (or she) may > found that some record are not identical. Only the latter requires human > notice, since there its no point wasting time on reconciled accounting > transactions. An automatic reconciliation system can load the digital > statement from the institution, compares the statement with the transaction in > the accounting book, and pinpoints the discrepancies out. Then human > accountant could step in and perform manual operations, such as checking other > vouchers, contact with banks, etc. In the situation of single user, the > automatic reconcile system have no reason to block manual reconciliation. > Besides, when I means "human err", I means that the accountant overlook an > discrepancy and regards it as identical. People do not spend too much time on > identical records, since major of the transaction would be in that state. > However, it could cause severe consequences if there do have a discrepancy. > Yours, > > Bite, Gao > Jan 6th, 2023 > > On 2023/1/5 12:03, Liz Dodd Wrote: > > On Wed, 4 Jan 2023 15:42:41 +0800 > > Bite Gao<redfrog2...@outlook.com> wrote: > > > > > GnuCash Developers and Maintainers: > > > Hello! While your software has done many tedious jobs previously > > > done by > > > accountants manually, it cannot automatically reconcile its > > > accounting data > > > to the bank statement in its digital form. In my opinion, the > > > automation of > > > reconciliation is not only efficient but also accurate since it > > > reduces human-caused errors. > > > I would appreciate you a lot if you could add an > > > auto-reconciliation function to your software. > > > Yours, > > > Bite Gao > > > Jan 4th, 2023 > > Bite, this is an interesting idea, but to me reconciliation requires > > human input. > > While I manually reconcile, I have to attend to pending transactions, > > for example a payment made on a card which never is taken from the bank > > account. At what time do I take that from the active list? Where will I > > put the the never finished transactions? > > > > A number which is different in my list to the banks? How will I check > > for the correct number? When do I contact the bank? > > > > They are human decisions, different in each jurisdiction. > > They are the reason I reconcile - not to have my numbers the same as > > the banks, but to see the discrepancies and decide on an action. > > > > Could you please describe more what you want from automated > > reconciliation? Your statement about "human-caused errors" implies that > > reconciliation introduces errors rather than highlights them. > > > > > > Liz > > _______________________________________________ > > gnucash-user mailing list > > gnucash-user@gnucash.org > > To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: > > https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user > > ----- > > Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. > > You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All. > _______________________________________________ > gnucash-user mailing list > gnucash-user@gnucash.org > To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: > https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user > ----- > Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. > You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All. _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. 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