Bill, see the note below.
I take all of the points you made in an earlier message; you're right,
reconcileing with QIF files is a potentially ill-defined, dangerous
process. And yet, we still have the note below.
It's been rumoured that Randolph Fritz said:
>
> On Tue, May 09, 2000 at 12:50:09AM -0500, Linas Vepstas wrote:
> >
> > I was talking to someone about on-line banking & gnucash. I hadn't
> > thought about ti much, but a large part of on-line banking is
> > reconciling statements against what the bank has. Now, many 'online
> > banks' use QIF export as a way of sending statements to users. Sooo
> > (sound of lightbulb turning on) isn't the right way to import QIF files
> > is to run them through a reconcile-like dialogue?
> >
> > Anyone out there using gnucash and also looking at thier bank-staements
> > on-line? What do y'all think?
> >
>
> That's exactly what I am currently doing manually, once a week. My
> Credit Union can provide transaction records in QIF format, but there
> doesn't seem to be a good way to use them with GnuCash. One of the
> things I like about this combination of services is the amount of work
> it saves; errors are caught early, and there is no need to laboriously
> drag through a month or more of transactions to unsnarl mistakes.
If I understand this correctly, and we did qif-based reconciliation,
it would work as follows:
-- randolph goes to bank web site, makes note of the banks current balance,
and downloads a qif.
-- he powers up gnucash, and picks 'reconcile-qif' from the menu.
-- we suck in the qif file, and try to find any transactions in it that
are not already recorded in the register. we pop up a window, saying
'do you want to add these transactions to your account?' and allow
user to add them one by one, or regject them one by one, till they're
done. We may want to help them idntify potential duplicates (e.g.
dates, amounts which are identical, but payee feild is different, or
dates that are same, payee field slightly misspeled, and amounts
slightly off ...)
-- when they're done with above, then we pop up the reconmcile window,
and from there, things proceed as normal reconciles do ...
with one 'minor' difference: instead of having 'y/n' in the reconcile
column, we might have a yellow 'm' for 'maybe' or 'c' for
candidate/confirm', and the 'c's' got marked that way because
we marked them when the QIF came in. randolph has only to click on
yellow c's to turn them into green y's to get full reconciled.
(and there would be a yellow subtotal, showing hopefully yellow $0.0
which turns green at the end ... )
Linas.
