OFX status and QIF questions

[Benoit Grégoire]

On March 27, 2002 11:05 pm, Derek Atkins wrote:
> Benoit Grégoire <bock@step.polymtl.ca> writes:
> > I am happy to announce that my project has been accepted, and that work
> > is coming along quickly.
>
> Congrats.
>
> [lots of good stuff deleted]
>
> > When support for the library is added into GnuCash, I hope GnuCash can do
> > much better than blindly converting transactions.  It should eliminate
> > duplicate, Auto-suggest matching transactions, etc.
> >
> > Comments and suggestions and questions are highly appreciated.
>
> Even though you plan to make a separate library, I would still like to
> see a coherent integration into Gnucash.  I agree that the integration
> should be more than just a dumb system, and should perform as you
> suggest.  Do you plan to integrate this yourself?  Is there anything
> in particular that you think you need?
>
> Keep in mind that recentlyy there has not been much change to the CVS
> repository....

I do plan on working on integration myself, but as I said, I won't have as 
much time to spend on the integration part as I first planned.  

I am planing the release of the first alpha of the library for the end of the 
week.  It will be a little light on documentation, but it is long overdue and 
should be enough for other developpers to give me feedback.

As promised I wrote a OFX to QIF converter to demonstrate the library, which 
might be usefull for some people.  Off course, a lot more info is provided by 
ofx than what will fit in a qif file.  But right now, I would need some 
pointers on the QIF file format to make sure I got it right.  The most 
important problem is that OFX can transmit data about more than one acount in 
a single session.  What I do is repeat the appropriate !Type: header line.  
Will this work, or is the only way to go is to generate a different qif file 
for each account?

I used the documentation available at 
http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/financeformats.html 
It states that "Warning:  The complaint against Intuit I described here is 
now no longer a fair one; they have, in the Quicken 99 release, included a 
fuller set of documentation of fields recently added to QIF files. At some 
point I should more fully describe these additional ``sections.'' Real Soon 
Now." Is this documentation available somewhere, so I can give information 
about the account a transaction belongs to?
At the end of the page there is a suggested "Open Accounting Interchange 
Format".  Is this implemented in gnucash?  It would be trivial for me to add 
this to ofx2qif.


At http://www.respmech.com/mym2qifw/qif_new.htm it is stated that: "The 
account header !Account is used in two places-at the start of an account list 
and the start of a list of transactions to specify to which account they 
belong."  So it would be possible to properly specify the account the that 
the transactions belong to.  However, I have not seen a file formatted this 
way anywhere, does it really work?

Here is the output it gives me right now, is this well formatted?

!Type:Bank
D24/3/2002
T-140.00
PRetrait au GA/H.E.C
MIAGA
LGeneric debit
^

Good night,

Benoit Grégoire