export/import from/to gnucash; and Cost Basis report

[David T.]

David--

GnuCash doesn't have an export feature. Try looking at http://gnucashtoqif.sourceforge.net/ It appears to offer this, but my reading suggests that you'd have to find a way to prune the result, since it appears to work only on complete files.

As for cost basis, try looking at the Advanced Portfolio report. It may successfully give you a cost basis for the mutual fund investment. There have been reported problems with this calculation, but since your account has no sales, the report may work for you.

HTH,
David

On Feb 10, 2013, at 8:44 PM, David Zelinsky <dzpost at dedekind.net> wrote:

> I have the following problem.  For the past few years I have been
> keeping track of some mutual funds held in a custodial account for my
> daughter, who is now old enough to handle it herself.  She already has a
> gnucash account tree that she uses for her bank acount and budgeting,
> but now she wants to add accounts for the mutual funds.  Meanwhile, I
> have all the data for the funds in my own gnucash file.
> 
> QUESTION 1 -- How can I export the mutual fund accounts data from my
> gnucash file in a form that she can import to her gnucash file?
> 
> The only Export option I see is "Export Accounts", but that only exports
> Account metadata, not the transactions.  It's the transactions that I'm
> concerned about.  Plus, I don't care about all transactions, just the
> ones involving the mutual funds in question.  (I realize there would
> complications in dealing with all the splits, but still it would be
> useful.)  I suppose I could write a perl script (or something) to parse
> the Transaction Report and produce a qfx file that could be imported to
> gnucash, but that seems like an enormous kludge.
> 
> Lacking an easy method to transfer all the dividend reinvestment
> transactions from my file to my daughter's, the other option I
> considered is having her start with an Opening Balance transaction,
> consisting of a purchase of the current balance of shares, at a price
> equal to the current average cost basis of the account.  Which brings me
> to:
> 
> QUESTION 2: Is there a way (e.g. a report) to get gnucash to calculate
> the average cost basis?
> 
> Obviously I can do it by hand (add up all the purchase amounts), but
> that seems pointlessly tedious and error-prone.  I've read descriptions
> of methods to report cost basis in conjunction with a sale transaction,
> but I don't have a sale transaction; plus I've read that this method
> only uses FIFO, not average cost.
> 
> I'm surprised there is no available report that calculates average cost
> basis.  Is that really true?  If so I may have to figure out how to use
> the report API so I can write one.
> 
> -- 
> David Zelinsky
> dzpost at dedekind.net
> _______________________________________________
> gnucash-user mailing list
> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
> -----
> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.