Arthur, If your bank has OFX/QFX export of the transactions this is usually the most reliable way of importing bank records into GnuCash as it is a fairly well defined standard protocol. CSV often takes a bit of work to do it relaibly as the protocol is less strictly defined.
I used to diligently enter transactions from receipts while I was running a business but now that I am retired and I no longer have a check book and I get most receipts from most stores by email or sms in any case and most EFTPOSand credit card transactions appear in my account almost immediately, there was little advantage for me in doing this, so I just import the Bank records periodically and like Ken keep a close eye out for any unexpected changes in the account balances at the bank You may want to do reconciliations more frequently while getting up to speed on using Gnucash. Most banks issue statements monthly so there is little point in doing them more frequently than that. My bank has a facility to provide me with a statement at a specific date (for which they charge me extra) beyond the monthly cycle, but I would only use that where I have detected a discrepancy and i haven't had one for more than 5 years now. Whether you can use the aqbanking DirectConnectOFX interface will depend upon on whether your bank makes that interface available. Most banks in Australia don't for example ( they place stricter security requirements for software to have direct connections which open source software generally cannot meet) but I gather many US and European banks do. GnuCash has a lot of features to help improve the import of data mainly in matching imported transactions to existing transactions and automatically assigning the correct transfer account to the second entry of imported transactions. This is a statistical Bayesian matching and is "trained" by the account assignments you make in the import matching window of the import process. The training only occurs if you assign the accounts in this process and then complete the import and does not reflect any changes to the account assignments made after completion of the import process. Once this is trained and working well, the import process is generally a lot quicker. I might have to manually assign 6-8 transactions a month on import (usually out of ~100 transactions imported) although it does pay to check that the import matcher has assigned the correct account to each transactions Allowing it to import to an incorrect account trains it to do the wrong thing. You currently are replying only to my direct email and not to the mailing list "gnucash-user@gnucash.org". If there is no "reply all,"or "reply to list" in the yahoo mail client ( it may be there but hidden), just add that email address to the "To" line in your reply. I have forwarded your email which came directly to me to the list. David Cousens On Sun, 2025-01-19 at 22:32 +0000, arthur brogard wrote: > Thank you for that. > > Very pertinent and important observations you make. > > At this early stage of my involvement with gnu cash I'm still unsure > if my usage of it is optimal: am I doing things the easiest/best way? > > The 'mechanics' of it, you might say. > > Seems to me I do a lot of work just to get my transactions out of the > bank and into gnu cash and reconcile. > > Seems to me I've heard of direct bank to gnu cash connection perhaps? > > Or even without that it could well be that I'm doing things a wrong > way round and I'd love to know if so. > > :) > > ab > > p.s. am I doing this right? I'm just using 'reply' on my Yahoo mail > client. I don't see where I can do the suggested 'reply list' or > 'reply all' > > > > > > > On Monday 20 January 2025 at 08:33:43 am ACDT, David Cousens > <davidcousen...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > > > > There is no best reconciliation strategy. An appropriate strategy > depends on exactly what you are using GnuCash for. > > A business with a high number of transactions will have a need for > relatively frequent reconciliation to detect errors, uncashed checks, > etc. and to satisfy any internal and external reportingand audit > requirements. In the case of personal finances, the frequency of > reconciliation required likely depends on the complexity of your > personal finances. > > Like Ken most of my transactions are cashless these days, and being > retired a lot fewer than they were when I was working and running a > business. Then monthly reconciliations proved to be both necessary > and > useful. Now I reconcile usually quarterly or even semi-annually. Like > Ken I check my accounts usually on a daily basis for major > discrepancies in the balances and for the automatically direct > debited > transactions that some websites sign you up for on the pretence of > paying for a one-off (I do try to avoid them) and obvious bank > errors, > but my bank has a pretty good error rate (haven't found one in the > past > 5 years). One factor that may influence timing would be a bank's > policies with regard to how long you may have to dispute errors and > relevant regulatory legislation that constrains application of such > policies so it is worth checking up on what those policies may be. > > On updating I prefer to stay up to date with the latest version of > GnuCash. Most Linux distributions are often well behind the most > recent > version. If you lag behind, particularly across the major version > boundaries updating can become a little bit more complex. There are > very rarely any major problems with the core functionality of Gnucash > in updates. The developers have done a very good job of making > updates > as painless as possible with procedures to update data files built > into > the update where necessary changes are made to the data file > structure. > > I build GnuCash from the stable source tarballs on release. I did a > little bit of minor work on some code areas in the past so building > from scratch does not faze me but some users may find it more > daunting, > mainly in having all the necessary dependency versions and > development > headers available. > > David Cousens > > On Sat, 2025-01-18 at 21:06 +0000, arthur brogard via gnucash-user > wrote: > > i just keep personal books for the family. > > my update and reconcile procedure works but is a bit tedious. I > > can't think of any better way and I doubt there is one but i > thought > > it might be good to ask. > > At sort of almost random times I decide to update the books. So I > > download from CBA transactions from the bank accounts. > > then I put them in a spreadsheet. in date order. > > then I inspect and compare with a transaction report from gnu cash - > > one for each account - and identify transactions not yet in gnu > cash. > > delete all but those from the spreadsheet. > > sort on description. > > attach a fourth column for target account. > > import to gnu cash. > > that's the update > > balances should agree. that's the reconcile. > > all that downloading, spreadsheeting, sorting blah, blah..... any > > better way or that's just it? > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > 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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