question about importing .qif files

[Jason Rennie]

rob@valinux.com said:
> one of the sourceforge people today asked me about gnucash, and after
> i raved about it for a few moments, he said, "I have 3 1/2 years of
> data there, will it create these new accounts for me as it goes when
> it encounters my new categories while I do my imports?" 

I recently did some QIF importing and I was quite impressed how 
relatively simple it was considering that Quicken does not do double 
entry accounting.  GNUCash lets you specify the translation from QIF 
categories to different accounts in your GNUCash account hierarchy.  The 
person who will be doing the importing should do some reading of 
documentation before trying to do the import.  It also helps to build an 
account hierarchy just to get a feel for what is possible.

He can find info on double accounting at:

  http://www.gnucash.org/docs/C/xacc-double.html

A nice sample account hierarchy is at:

  http://www.gnucash.org/docs/C/xacc-groups.html

Btw, you can safely say a wholehearted "yes" to your friend in response 
to his question.  If he wants to have the accounts organized in a nice 
hierarchical fashion, he will need to build that hierarchy *before* 
importing.  He will also need to specify the mapping from category name 
to GNUCash account name (GNUCash provides a nice interface for doing 
this).

Jason D Rennie          www.ai.mit.edu/~jrennie/
MIT:  (617) 253-5339          jrennie@ai.mit.edu
MITRE: (781) 271-7249          jrennie@mitre.org