Quickbooks export

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Perry Smith <pedz at easesoftware.net> writes:

> In Quickbooks, you can run a report called "Custom Transaction Detail
> Report" which appears to give you a report of all the transactions
> with all the fields.  You can then export this report to Excel.  At
> that point, it seems plausible to import the data into Gnucash.

It's certainly plausible...

> One method is to dump the excel spreadsheet out as a text file or
> comma separated file, write a parser to read it, and create either an
> OFX file or QIF file, and import those into Gnucash.

If you're going to go through the work to write a parser to read it,
why not hook that parser into gnucash, rather than going OUT to yet
another format?

> The other thought I had was to create a Gnucash xml file directly.

No, I would defintely NOT recommend going this route..

> So the two questions that come up:
> 
> 1) has this been done?  It seems like lots of people would use it and
> it doesn't seem that hard.  Am I missing something?

Nope, it has not been done.  There have been a number of people
suggesting it (just look through the archives over the last 6 months).
Pulling the transaction history into gnucash would be relatively easy
-- it would involve writing the format parser and then just hooking it
up to the import infrastructure.

The only issue is lack of developer time to work on this problem...
Are you offering?

One thing to note that is that the current import infrastructure does
not have a means to import customer/vendor/invoice information, so
something like that would have to be designed..  Otherwise you would
lose all your A/R and A/P "state" across an import.

> 2) What file format would you go to? OFX, QIF, or xml?

I would write a parser to read the original format, rather than create
some conversion tool.

> Perry

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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