Importing prior transactions

[John Morris]

Hi Rich,
  I was in the same boat about a year ago, switching from twenty years' use of Quicken to GnuCash. It is certainly possible to import old transactions via qif. However, I'll give you two caveats: First, I found that GnuCash bogs down with too much data. Because I did not want to have to go back to Quicken to look at the old data, I imported everything, tolerating the sluggish performance while I did this, and then split the file in two (everything before 2010 and everything after 2010). That reduced the file to a manageable size while still giving me the option of reviewing some of the old transactions.

  Second, I found that GnuCash's importer is extremely finicky. Therefore, I encourage you to run a few trial imports into a scrap file before you work with the real data. That should give you a chance to clean up the data without causing chaos in your production data. I'm sorry, but I can't remember all the details of the problems, but I do recall that I had to remove all non-ASCII characters from the qif file.

  Good luck with it.

Best,
John

> On Jan 18, 2017, at 1:44 PM, Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> wrote:
> 
>  Reading the gnucash-help section on importing .qif files does not answer my
> question. I believe the answer is 'yes' and would like that confirmed or
> refuted.
> 
>  It's early enough this year for me to manually enter all January
> transactions into gnucash from the jgnash software I've been using. Then I
> can use gnucash from now on.
> 
>  I have the .qif format information and can export accounts from jgnash as
> .csv files, then translate them with a brief awk script. Because all
> transactions have dates (and the checking account transactions also have
> check numbers) I assume that I can import all these 2016 and earlier
> transactions into gnucash in the correct order; that is, prior to the 2017
> transactions.
> 
>  Is my assumption correct?
> 
> TIA,
> 
> Rich