Recently there was some restructuring of some of my retirement accounts (still under control of my former employer). This caused problems with importing because the parent accounts of the securities were altered. This led to a lot of questions from the importer. This entailed a tedious process of selecting the correct "new" account. One particular difficulty is that the same security may be used in more than one branch of the account tree. Fortunately the importer actually supplies some detailed information which greatly helps identify the correct branch.
1. I discovered that the importer does not require uniqueness. That is, multiple accounts in the import file can be mapped to the same gnucash account. My accounting is strictly personal so the restructuring just meant creating an appropriate branch for each investment and reparenting the account. The nonuniqueness allowed me to point transactions corresponding to the old and new versions of the investment to the new one. *Thus for me the nonuniqueness is a desirable feature.* 2. The account selection process seems to make some unwarranted assumptions that resulted in extra steps and in some cases a difficult to resolve ambiguity. i. After I selected one branch for a matching account, the importer kept suggesting that same branch for all subsequent selections. This resulted in extra steps to select the correct branch. It would have been better for the importer to suggest the branch of the last selection and not the very first one. ii. The ambiguity arose when the importer asked what income account to associate with a security. In my setup, the assignment of any income attributable to an investment depends on which branch of the accounts this particular investment occurs. (taxable or not?, IRA, 403b, brokerage?) The name/symbol of the security does not uniquely determine the branch. What I needed was that more detailed information that appears when the account corresponding to the investment is selected. Before I add a formal request for enhancement, I would be interested in knowing whether others have the same or similar concerns. I checked bugzilla and did not find anything. Dale _______________________________________________ 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.
