[moneydance] Checks won't match bank download

[Brett Johnson]

On Sat, 2009-03-14 at 16:23 -0400, John Muccigrosso wrote:
> I can see why you might put in some date checking, but when there's a  
> check number AND an amount that match, shouldn't that item be at  
> least a possible match?

I'll second this request.  Is there an existing bug report or
enhancement request already about this?

The matching algorithm is particularly horrendous when you're adding
transactions to a relatively new account, which doesn't have a lot of
payee history.  In that case, it seems to try *way* to hard to find a
"matching" transaction, rather than conceding that it might be a "repeat
payee".  Often, it'll find a "matching" transaction that has nothing at
all in common with the current transaction, except for the amount (i.e.
the check number is different, the date is different, the payee is
different, and *still* MD insists on "matching" the transactions).

I'm not sure it's possible to come up with a single algorithm for
"matching" that will satisfy everyone, and work well in all situations.
But it would be a *huge* help IMO, if the algorithm were simply less
opaque and documented.  Even better would be if there were some way to
tweak the algorithm from the UI -- say some way to assign different
weights to different fields, depending on the account.  Say, for
example, a checking account might want the "check number" field to be
the highest priority for matching -- yet in a credit card account, the
"check number" is meaningless, and you'd want to rely on transaction
dates, amounts, and payees.  So the ability to custom-tweak the matching
algorithm per-account would be invaluable IMO.

-- 
Brett Johnson <brett at hp.com>