IIF, QIF, QuickBooks Import

[Craig Lanning]

On Thu, 2003-04-17 at 08:55, Francis K Shim wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-04-17 at 00:10, Craig Lanning wrote:
> > On Wed, 2003-04-16 at 23:45, Derek Atkins wrote:
> > > Craig Lanning <CraigL at Knology.net> writes:
> > > Well, I've upgraded my system to RH9, installed all the necessary
> > > > libraries, checked gnucash out via CVS, successfully compiled and run
> > > > it.  I'm interested in looking at the code related to IIF (and I guess
> > > > QIF).  I also want to see what can be done to import data from
> > > > QuickBooks (I have version 6).
> > > 
> > > As you know, right now there is no way to import from Quickbooks...
> > 
> > Partly, because there's not an official way to export from QuickBooks. 
> > It looks like the best we can do is to "print" to a tab delimited file
> > and use that to import.  (IIF is basically a tab delimited file anyway
> > so this and IIF should be able to share a lot of code.)
> 
> Craig (and Derek), although Intuit is very "closed" about exporting from
> their spreadsheet database used in QuickBooks there is a company,
> DataBlox, that create products that can read directly from the
> QuickBooks files.  The only caveat is that they base their software on
> the Win9x/2000 GUI platforms; however, they have APIs and describe the
> QuickBooks transaction format from a high level that may prove very
> useful to the GnuCash import.  Look for their mainstay product QOffice
> or OfficeQ (one of them, anyway).

Thanks, I'll see if I can glean any useful info from their site.

> 
> > > > Is anybody currently working with the QIF import code?  If not, is
> > > > anybody familiar enough with it to answer questions?
> > > 
> > > Nobody is actively working on it.  I've been reluctantly maintaining
> > > it.  I'd very much like to see the existing QIF importer go away and
> > > see a UI created to tie into the new qif-io-core code....  (hint hint).
> > 
> > Yeah, you dropped that hint the first time I mentioned this a couple of
> > months ago.  I'll look at the current one to see how it hooks into the
> > rest of Gnucash, then I'll look at the qif-io code to see how it works
> > and how to hook it in instead.  Should keep me busy for a while.
> 
> Although, I have not planned to put any priority on this part of GnuCash
> I might be able to help out in other ways... I am looking back to "Wine"
> and "QuickBooks" for other ways of using the QuickBooks mechanism, but
> GnuCash is on my list of substitutes.
>
> Anyway, (I might regret this, given the hint...) I'll try and help
> out... it's only fair we shouldn't leave our fellow Linuxers in a lurch
> :-)

I've used QuickBooks for around 10 years.  I've used it via wine for the
last year or two.  Then when the RH9 betas broke wine (the wine team has
fixed the problem now) I realized that it was time to get serious about
moving away from QB.  I started looking for Linux based accounting
software and found Gnucash.  The Gnucash feature I found most
interesting is the PostgreSQL backend.  I really look forward to having
that fully functional.  (I hope the people working on this are keeping
the PostgreSQL hooks separate from the rest of the SQL code so that
other databases can be used instead of PostgreSQL.)

Not only have I used QB for my personal finances (Quicken wouldn't do
what I wanted to do), I also keep the finances for my church (yes, that
means I'm the treasurer).  Having the financial data in a real database
would mean that other programs could be written to extract (and
potentially insert) data from (to) the database.

Having a good mechanism for importing all the legacy financial info from
QB would allow me to migrate the historical data for the church from QB
to Gnucash.

Sorry for the long winded dissertation of my motives.  I'll go back to
my day job now.

Craig