importing multiple currencies

[Jeff Abrahamson]

I've been lurking a while, but today is the day I've finally decided
to try to import my quicken books into gnucash. (I.e., I've never used
gnucash on real data yet, just done samples to convince myself it will
work.)

So I export all from quicken and import it into gnucash. A couple
problems arise, the most significant being the currency issue.


1. How do I import? By this I mean, I seem to be stuck importing
   multiple currencies at once, but then I have to manually set
   currencies once it's done importing. Is this correct?

   If I choose instead to import in multiple batches (the USD
   accounts, the FRF accounts, the EUR accounts, etc.), then many
   transactions don't see their other sides.

   Oh, the pain. Is there help?

   Fwiw, I represented currencies in quicken by using mutual funds as
   clearing accounts between currencies and having categories tagged
   with the currency (food_usd, food_eur, food_frf). To say quicken
   didn't help me here is an understatement.

   I'm regretting ever introducing FRF's for the seven months that I'll
   have them in my books...


2. How do I organize the import once it's done? By that I mean, I end
   up with accounts for each security, even securities I haven't held
   in years (logical, but made me pause). And then, of course,
   anything that used to be a category is now an account.

   It's all quite overwhelming. I know it's non-trivial to sort out,
   but this is small comfort.

   Reading the docs is not helping me figure out how to organize
   things. I gather there's a hierarchy it should all follow.


I'm wondering if I must bite the bullet and close out everything,
balance as of the last sane day (4/31, before I split my financial
life over two countries), and open a new file. But I would miss having
the historical data handy, so this is a very last-ditch solution.

Perhaps this is partly my lack of understanding of accounting
principles, which gnucash wants me to know much better than quicken
did. (Good for gnucash.) Can anyone recommend a good online reference?


Fwiw, I'm running debian potato, which means I'm using a rather old
copy of gnucash. I don't think (but correct me if I'm wrong) that this
should substantially affect the above, as the improvements in 1.6 from
1.4 (and the late 1.3 I've got) seem to be more in once I've got it
all working. Woody should go stable soon, so by the time I really
start using this in earnest, I should be more modern. At least by tax
time. ;-)


Thanks in advance for any help.

-- 
 Jeff

 Jeff Abrahamson  <http://www.purple.com/jeff/>