Johnathon, What facilities exist with your bank for automated transaction download will to some extent depend upon your bank and what standards they have adopted for communication with their customers.
Most banks should at least use the Open Financial Exchange (OFX) protocol either as a file you can download and import into OFX. Some banks will support a program logging in to a portal automatically and directly importing transactions using the same OFX protocol or using the interface that was largely developd in European Banks. OFX is in turn an example of an XML (eXtensible Markup Language) which used tags of the format <ACCOUNT>Saving Account</ACCOUNT> to enclose and identify the type of the datawithin the tags. In OFX the tags associated with finacial data have a specified meaning. If you Google search for these acronyms you will turn up their definitions and specifications usually on a site with a .org suffix. Some banks will also offer financial data in other formats such as QIF (Quicken Interchange Format) which is a proprietary format for Quicken programs but also widely used by others or QFX which is a Quicken version of the OFX protocol. QFX files can be imported with the "Import OFX" menu entry as they are essentially the same format. Another tabular format offered is CSV (Comma Separated Values) which originated with spreadshett data, E.g. Microsoft Excel although it predated Excel (IBM 360 Fortran around 1972 I believe). My bank only allows on-line access via their website and an authorized logon to that site, not directaccess at present. I can the export selected data for a given date range inany of OFX/QFX, QIF, MSMoney orCSV formats. Once downloaded to my computer I import the OFX files into GnuCash and check for any transactions which were not made by me usually while importing them and assigning the Expense accounts or Income accounts associated with the transaction to my bank account. You may need to read some introductory material on double entry accounting in general and as it is implemented in Gnucash. Wikipedia has some very good explanantions of double entry accounting (see their headings Double Entry Accounting, Accounting Equation, Debits and Credits for example. You will also find other information sources on line. The GnuCash Tuorial and Concepts guide is a good point to start with GNuCash specific information https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v3/C/gnucash-guide/index.html David Cousens ----- David Cousens -- Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-User-f1415819.html _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
