Quickbooks export

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Please be sure to CC: gnucash-devel in your replies....

Perry Smith <pedz at easesoftware.net> writes:

> On Monday, Jul 7, 2003, at 09:32 US/Central, Derek Atkins wrote:
> 
> > The only issue is lack of developer time to work on this problem...
> > Are you offering?
> 
> Yes.
> 
> I'm definitely going to make a hard stab at it.  I'd much rather move
> to Gnucash with all my data than without.

Cool!

> I have a lot of compiler, parser, lexical analysis skills.  Thats like
> falling off a log to me.  I'd need help feeding it into gnucash.

Ok.  I'm not sure how much this will help you, necessarily,
but good to know ;)

> Putting it inside gnucash is fine with me.  Any suggestions of
> routines or places in the code to start looking at how to do this?

Look at the generic importer in src/import-export -- it provides a
bunch of routines to help you import stuff.  I'm in the process of
adding a bit more to help you parse numeric and date strings in
arbitrary formats.

You can also look at the existing OFX or HBCI code to see how they
use the generic importer...

If you have specific questions about importing, feel free to ask.

> > One thing to note that is that the current import infrastructure does
> > not have a means to import customer/vendor/invoice information, so
> > something like that would have to be designed..  Otherwise you would
> > lose all your A/R and A/P "state" across an import.
> 
> I'm not clear on this point.  By "customer/vendor/invoice"
> information, are you talking about such things as the customer's
> address, etc which may not be part of the transaction?

Yes (otherwise how would you be able to create new invoices in GnuCash
if you didn't have customer information?).

> I think Quickbooks has a way to export "lists" of things already.

Well, we would need to get this imported, too... However the current
importer doesn't have this.

> >> 2) What file format would you go to? OFX, QIF, or xml?
> >
> > I would write a parser to read the original format, rather than create
> > some conversion tool.
> >
> >> Perry
> >
> > -derek

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available