wish: option to import in pending status and approve later

[J]

After importing transactions from QIF, I like to keep them in a 'pending queue.' The Remind status is perfect for this, but currently, I have to manually go into each account & change the status for each imported transaction to 'Remind' before quitting (as the 'newly imported' icon will not be present on the next session).

It would be nice if Automatic Assignments could be used to assign "everything" (i.e. every imported transaction) to Remind, so that the Remind window could effectively serve as the queue.

Bonus: the ability to remove transactions from Remind via context menu in the Remind window. Currently I need to double-click each, bring up the edit dialog, change it there, & close the dialog.

[Maxime DOYEN (mdoyen)]

Indeed, you use the Remind status out of what is was designed for.

Status must not (and will not) be changed by the assignment rules, which handles the classification of transaction (category, payee, payment). Nor must be (and will not be) mass editable.

Let's start from the beginning:
What do you mean by: "keep them in a 'pending queue'." ?
And why to do this ?

=> What I need to understand is your initial use case, or workflow you try to design, NOT the way you try to divert the HomeBank function to achieve it.

[J (metal450)]

>>What I need to understand is your initial use case, or workflow you try to design

The behavior I'm trying to reproduce: when I import a QIF, all imported transactions go into a "queue" - a list where I can accept/resolve them one at a time. I essentially use it like a ToDo list, where every time new transactions are imported, they automatically go into that list. Some items I can just resolve right away (aka they get removed from that list), some may stay there for a while, reminding me to come back & deal with them. To me, that sounded exactly like the purpose of "remind" - the only difference being that I'd like each newly imported transaction to automatically appear in that list, to remind me to review it until I've had a chance to do so.

In Quicken, this behavior is enabled by unchecking Preferences->Downloaded Transactions->Automatically add to xx registers. In their case, the transactions don't actually get added to the register until you "accept" them, but that's not actually important to my - the goal is simply to have all new transactions appear in a list so that they can be reviewed, or left in that list as a reminder to review them later.

>>Indeed, you use the Remind status out of what is was designed for.

Isn't that exactly what Remind was designed for? To have a place to put transactions that you'd like to be reminded to review/check/handle? :)

[J (metal450)]

And one clarification: I know that *while* you're importing the QIF, there are dialogs showing the transactions that will be imported. That's something different though: in this case, the import takes place, all the transactions from all the accoutns are brought into the registers. Then I have one central queue with all the new stuff, where I can maybe resolve one or two easy ones right now, leave the rest to be resolved later. If you've ever used Quicken, it's easy to see the behavior - that's what I'm trying to migrate away from, hopefully to Homebank :)

[Maxime DOYEN (mdoyen)]

ok, so what you need is to mark transaction, manually or maybe automatically.
so this is similar to #1600356

[J (metal450)]

...That's actually not what I'm looking for, unless that also included once central list on the main UI - exactly like the "remind" list - where only "marked" items would appear.

(Really, what I'm looking for is precisely "remind" - just simply with the option to automatically toggle that status for items that are imported...)

[J (metal450)]

Circling back to this, as another 2.5 years have elapsed. I'm still using Quicken, but would still love to move to HomeBank - but am uncertain how to solve this.

I did find another user asking for almost the exact same thing, from 10 years ago, here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/homebank/+bug/998971 . Unfortunately, I'm not really clear on your suggested resolution from 2012, & when I asked about it 2 years ago, didn't receive any reply.

Is there some existing approach for "pending transactions", per that other user's post, or per my post above...?

Thanks

[Maxime DOYEN (mdoyen)]

With 5.8 and waiting something more dedicated maybe, you can use flags.

But this enable to mark txn , they still in the flow which is part of the behavior of quicken
https://help.quicken.com/display/WIN/Pending+Transactions+Preferences

I will play a little with that into quicken, but probably as simple as a marker + outflow status

[J (metal450)]

I just installed 5.8, but I wasn't able to see how to accomplish this?

Upon importing transactions, there's a way to have all newly-imported transactions automatically have a flag, and then to have a consolidated view of all those flagged transactions (exactly like the "Remind" pan), from which you can un-flag them as they're dealt with?

Still the exact, perfect, ideal solution seems to be if there were simply the ability to auto-assign "remind" to each imported transaction. I'm not seeing a way to auto-assign "flag" to each imported transaction, and then a pane like "remind" from which they can be reviewed in future sessions.

[Maxime DOYEN (mdoyen)]

After reviewing back this wish again.
Definitely the Remind status, nor flags was designed for that, so not a solution.

I've recently, seen this behavior in YNAB as I was working on #2061227 to find a clever way on how to do it.

So here is what I'm going to do:
- add an option in settings, as no one except you asked for this, but it may make sense
- every imported txn will be flagged as imported
++ excluded for computing, etc
++ with an additional icon into the list
++ with a reminder message at top of account
++ with a filter option
- then you will have a new entry Approve/Reject into the context menu,
++this will unflag the txn

[J (metal450)]

> Definitely the Remind status, nor flags was designed for that, so not a solution.

Respectfully, I'm really not understanding this response tho. If it solves the need perfectly...then it is a solution - like what difference does it make what use-case something was "designed for" if it can be perfectly used to satisfy other needs as well?

> So here is what I'm going to do:

Does that have a consolidated view of all those "not yet approved" imported transactions across all accounts? (If not, it sounds like finding them would require going into each account one at a time, manually, and applying the filter to find them).

[Maxime DOYEN (mdoyen)]

1> Not at all, for many reason. As many, if not all, users use remind feature the way it is designed for (and documented), any change to this feature and its behavior or workflow would prevent them continue using it that way. Additionally if a user wants to remind a money lend to a friend in several txn and if any imported transaction get the same status and also the same icon, then it is no more possible to distinguish both.
Additionally there is no feature to mass remove the remind status.
So you are still free to consider it is a solution, but it is not.

2> Of course... Has any imported transaction will be marked with a specific icon (different from remind), you will be able to review and approve unitary or massively them in both:
- per account ledger, which make more sense as usually the reconcile is done per account
- but as well from the all account ledger view

[J (metal450)]

> any change to this feature and its behavior or workflow would prevent them continue using it that way.

Wait but I was just proposing to have the option in the Automatic Assignment dialog to assign the "Remind" flag (like how we can now do with Payee, Category, Payment, and Tags). Users could simply not use that type of auto-assignment, and nothing changes for them, right? So how would offering that option prevent them from continuing to use Remind as they do currently? I could just put .* as the search term, and assign to Remind - super simple, & shouldn't break anyone's current/existing use-case as they can choose to use or not use that auto-assignment target.

(As a side note, I can see a lot of other potential uses for being able to assign to Remind - for instance, let's say someone would like to be reminded whenever they receive a payment from a particular person. One could add a rule here that adds a reminder when a transaction is imported from that person. Or maybe when I pay rent, I want to be reminded to collect the share from my roomates - so I can auto-assign every rent payment to "Remind", and so on. In my case, I'd personally just auto-assign .* - but there's other stuff it could be used for too).

> if a user wants to remind a money lend to a friend in several txn and if any imported transaction get the same status and also the same icon, then it is no more possible to distinguish both.

Sure, I can see how if someone needed to distinguish "remind me to deal with imported transactions" from "remind me to deal with transactions for another reason," they couldn't. For my particular usage, one particular type of "Remind" is sufficient tho.

> Additionally there is no feature to mass remove the remind status.

Yup, that's what I meant by "the ability to remove transactions from Remind via context menu in the Remind window. Currently I need to double-click each, bring up the edit dialog, change it there, & close the dialog." So total agreement here :)

> So you are still free to consider it is a solution, but it is not.

Perhaps there's just a difference of terminology here :) What I mean by "a solution" is that "it solves my particular need." Certainly there are other possible cases that it doesn't solve too :)

> any imported transaction will be marked with a specific icon (different from remind), you will be able to review and approve unitary or massively them in both

Cool, that's good. The only thing I'd add is some way to show them on the main UI - i.e. a 4th tab down there with "Schedule", "Future", "Remind", and "Pending" (or similar).

Another possibility could be to have a little flag next to the account in the "Accounts" list (this is how Quicken does it), tho IMHO I feel like a unified bin at the bottom is cleaner & more elegant - & they could be approved/deleted easily from there :)

In any case, great to see some motion here - thanks!! :)