Thanks for the feedback. I am currently rewriting part of the documentation in the Help manual on importing. The comments about Base, Destination and transfer accounts are quite timely and I have struggled with that terminology while doing the rewrite.
The difficulty arises primarily because in accounting terms there is really no difference in the accounts associated with the various splits in a transaction. Which is the base/source account and which is the transfer or destination account is really determined by which register you are viewing the transaction from and/or into which account/register you are importing the transactions. There is an inherent ambiguity that can be difficult to describe in all circumstances. The "minimum to import data" is actually correct in that a csv file must at least contain those columns for data to be imported at all. GnuCash or the user can assign the destination account. It is not necessary, although certainly desirable to dhave the destination account specified in the input file. Unfortunately GnuCash is not the origin of most files to be imported and as these are from banks and other institutions in the main, the terminalogy used is optimal for their needs and not really for GnuCash specifically. Your point about adding and populating a destination account column before importing. This of course presumes one has a fully populated CoA setup before starting to import. One of the reasons for the recommended procedure of initially importing in small batches is to at least get the core of the CoA setup and to at least partially train the Bayesian matcher before importing the bulk of the data. The Bayesian matcher only derives its data from the import process and does not use any information about existing transaction account assignments already present in Gnucash. I have expanded the description of the import matcher considerably. The Help manual is oriented more towards a description of the interfaces. In some of Geert' more recent improvements the dialogs lead you through the process fairly effectively so a guide section almost becomes redundant. I am planning on adding sections to the guide illustrating the import process in more detail for a few example cases , particularly the CSV import(minimal import, multiline multisplit data, GnuCash exported data( simple layout and multiline), stock and currency) where the format is not constrained by any standard. Flexibility has its price unfortunately. One of the perennial problems is terminology. If you come from another program or even from a general accounting background the previous use of terms within another context can make it difficult to interpret the help and guide, at least initially. A glossary was fairly recently added to the Tutorial and Concepts Guide by @sunfish62. Unfortunately this simply puts the header information from the glossary up in the popup and not the definition part in the current DocBooks implementation. It is possible to open the glossary in another tab however. I hope to make the glossary common to both the guide and the help manual in the future and I hope this will go a long way to settling problems re slightly different usage of terminology in different places in the guide and help manuals. These changes probably won't be in the guide and help manual until V4 comes out. Some parts are currently being reviewed. 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.
