GC

[Craig Lanning]

On Sun, 2003-02-16 at 17:16, Glenn English wrote:
> On Sun, 2003-02-16 at 13:20, Derek Atkins wrote:
> 
> > > Where is a description of IIF (and the differences between Mac and
> > > Windows flavors)? Google didn't find one quickly.

I looked around the Intuit site, but didn't find any kind of formal
specification for IIF.  (I use QuickBooks 6.0 for Windows.)

I have looked through the IIF files that QB produced from my data and
found that it is basically a tab delimited file similar to what would be
read or written by a spreadsheet program.  (OpenOffice.org read it quite
easily.)

> > No clue.  This is part of the problem...
> 
> Another part: Unless I have overlooked something big, "QuickBooks Pro
> 5.0 for the Mac" doesn't export transactions. Just the lists of names,
> accounts, customers, vendors, etc. No dollars except balances in
> accounts. If this is true, an IIF importer wouldn't be much use.

I spent some time looking at the export capabilities for QB6 and found
basically the same thing.  Since the IIF format itself appears to be
nothing more than a simplified spreadsheet, it might be possible to
build the IIF importer (and provide sufficient documentation) such that
it would allow a user to "print" a transaction report to a file in tab
delimited form.

Craig

> Might it be reasonable to take a directory full of QB reports and munge
> them into a GnuCash xml data file? Or is that the definition of an
> importer?