Splasm Software Discussions

It used to be that when I imported entries from a QIF file the imported entries would get checked when I imported them. Now they show up unchecked and I have to go through and manually check each one... a pain in the ass. Any ideas how I might be able to get it back to the previous behavior: when an item is imported from a QIF file i'd like the associated reconcile checkbox to be checked automatically.

Thanks,

scott

There's a technical explanation that probably ties into what you're seeing there.

Each QIF transaction can have an optional C, or "cleared", field. It used to be that CheckBook would simply look for that field and, if it did not exist, it would leave the Entry as unresolved but if it did exist it would mark the Entry as resolved. We based this behavior on our observations of the way Quicken generates QIF - since Quicken would leave out the C field for transactions that hadn't cleared it seemed its very existence in an incoming QIF transaction would signal that the transaction was, in fact, cleared and should therefore be marked as resolved in CheckBook. That turned out to be wrong because other personal finance managers would export QIF transactions with blank C fields, which should be interpreted as unresolved. So we changed things slightly so that if the C field does not exist or if it does and it's blank, the Entry will be unresolved, and if the C field does exist and is not blank the Entry will be resolved. This change would affect your situation if your QIF transactions do have a C field but that C field is blank. Older CheckBook would've incorrectly marked those transactions as resolved but newer CheckBook will not.

So the question is...can you check one of your QIF files in TextEdit and see if its transactions contain a line that begins with a C, and whether any of those lines that do start with C have anything else on the same line? If there is no C field, or if it's there but it's blank, that would balance with the way CheckBook is behaving. If the QIF is coming from a bank then, essentially, the bank is generating malformed QIF because you can safely assume everything in a checking or savings account's statement download has already cleared the real world account. The next question would then be how to elegantly engineer a win for you that doesn't negatively impact usability for the majority of users whose QIF is not malformed...

_________________
Keith Gugliotto
Primordial Sea Captain
Splasm Software
https://www.splasm.com

There are multiple lines that contain just:
CC

It seem like every transaction has that line as part of its chunk of data... is that the field you're talking about? Is that what it's supposed to be?



Given the design of their online banking site, this wouldn't surprise me. :/



A preference in the import dialog to mark all incoming/imported items as cleared? I only ever import QIFs downloaded from my bank so I could safely tell CheckBook to mark all imported items as Cleared...

Thanks,

Scott

Hi,

Any thoughts on whether this is an issue with the QIF files I download from my bank, or something else?

Thanks,

Scott

It looks to be an issue with the way CheckBook is expecting the field to be populated. We're asking it to see if the field equals an asterisk or an 'X'. There was a time when we thought it should be that way based on the loose documentation available around the web. Now we're thinking that it should just check to see if the field is empty. Empty or non-existent field - not resolved. Populated field - resolved. We can get that fix into CheckBook 1.8.2.

_________________
Keith Gugliotto
Primordial Sea Captain
Splasm Software
https://www.splasm.com

Sounds good. Looking forward to it.

Thanks,

Scott