Eldon Rosenberg
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Suggestion: In the "Match payees/memos to GnuCash accounts" dialog, allow users to edit the payee/memo part of the match to put in wildcards / regular expressions, validate that the resultant pattern matches the original, and then remove other payee/memo list entries that match (i.e. amalgamate them into 1 line) so that the account assignment only needs to be done once, then I think this would accomplish the desired result nicely. I believe this would require that mappings listed in the user's qif-accounts-map file be treated as patterns (or regular expressions), or that some cue be added to any mapping that represents a pattern (I'd prefer this option).
Some years ago I wrote a simple Java program to pre-process the .QIF files from my bank because of this and another problem. The other problem is possibly just a quirk of my banking entity: it often lists further identifying information about transactions on one or two separate transactions with the same date and a zero value. Due to this 2nd problem I can't reliably identify transactions during the QIF Import Assistant if I haven't pre-processes the input file to merge the extra descriptive information into the one transaction. Since there wasn't a wildcard matching function in GnuCash, and other people's programs along these lines didn't work with my peculiar .QIF files, I wrote my little Java program to do both. If it was just addressing the 2nd problem it wouldn't need a GUI, but since it involves creating and editing text patterns (I use regular expressions), I gave it a GUI too. But it has occurred to me that my GUI somewhat resembles the "Match payees/memos to GnuCash accounts" dialog, though I have also added the ability to optionally match on dates and amounts and to add extra narration to the description of the matched transaction (that is, the processed output file gets extra narration text added to transactions where desired). Anyway, this similarity suggested to me the solution I began with above: to add pattern editing to that step in the import assistant.
Regards,
Eldon