Gnucash: how to combine scheduled transactions and online banking data?

Question

I don't know how to combine scheduled transactions and banking data in practice. What I have done already:

• I am fairly new to accounting, but have read Accounting for Computer Scientists, so I know the basics.
• I already used gnucash for a while and entered all my expenses and income. Now I want to automate things (starting from scratch).
• I have some scheduled transactions, f.e. rent and the rent is substracted from my checking account each month. So I would like to create the transaction via gnucash's scheduled transactions functionality and confirm that the payment happened via the checking account data. That means I could plan ahead via scheduled transactions and can verify some transactions of my banking account. That is known as reconciliation.

My problem is: I don't know how to combine the two. Can I match scheduled transactions to be confirmed by imported data? How should the account structure be for this?

A scheduled transaction, like rent

• decreases my checking account
• increases my rent account

and is unconfirmed. During reconciliation I would like to import my banking data, but this would also decrease my checking account and increase my rent account; the scheduled transaction has already been created.

I think I don't get some part of the reconciliation or import process.

Answer 1

Part of the process for importing your bank data is to resolve imported transactions against existing transactions already showing on the account. This is called "matching" transactions, and should occur before you finish importing any financial data. Thus, if I have a scheduled transaction on the 1st for rent:

4/1/1999   "Payment to evil landlords"      Expenses:Rent      $100

And the actual transaction comes in from my bank account on the 3rd (because nobody pays rent on time):

3-Apr-1999   ACH DEBIT TO ABC RENTAL COMPANY          -$100

It is my job to tell the software that these two transactions are really the same thing, and to not create an extra record for the "ACH DEBIT..." under the bank account. There are guides showing you how to do this for multiple file types, for example here is the import guide for the Quicken "QIF" file type (the most common format for downloaded bank transaction data). If you go through the process and something goes wrong, you can always restore a backup of your gnucash file and try again.