[moneydance] Transaction matching rules

[Sean Reilly]

On Jul 31, 2008, at 14:42 , Uday S Reddy wrote:
> Dear Sean,
>
> Many banks do not provide QFX/OFX downloads.  Quicken's shutdown of
> QIF import feature is one of the main motivations for us to switch to
> Moneydance.  If Moneydance is also unable to handle QIF import
> satisfactorily, we have no serious options left.
>
> The last time I checked, Moneydance was matching transactions in the
> register upto 3 months in the past, and upto 1 month in the future of
> the downloaded transaction.  I have posted a detailed discussion in my
> previous note in April 2008:
>
>  http://moneydance.com/pipermail/moneydance-info/2008-April/ 
> 009938.html

This is a great write-up, and I'm sorry I seemed to have missed it  
before.  The biggest cause of the problem is that transactions in QIF  
files do not have unique identifiers to differentiate them.  This  
means that when Moneydance imports two QIF transactions with the exact  
same description, date and amount no assumptions can be made about  
whether they are the same transaction or not.

> This causes an inordinate amount of manual work in matching
> transactions for us, which seems simply unnecessary.  If Moneydance
> can be tweaked to restrict its matches to within a week of the
> transaction date, like Quicken does, then we would have a usable
> system.

I've added a preference setting for this in the Network tab of the  
Preferences window (available now in preview build 615).  You can now  
choose the date window for matching downloaded transactions.  The only  
down side is that the window is now the same number of days in each  
direction (before the matching algorithm looked 90 days backwards and  
30 days forwards).  However if multiple matches are found, the ones  
after the local date will be (slightly) preferred.

I think that if you import mostly QIF files or only ever add  
transactions from downloaded files then you will probably want to set  
the matching window to a very low number or even zero.


Thanks,
Sean