Migration from Quicken Home & Business

[Derek Atkins]

"William McDonald Buck" <dee at wmbuck.net> writes:

> One is that I'm using Intuit's Quicken Home & Business product, and
> that seems to cause some problems. In particular there are some
> additional accounts it creates which cause the import to choke. For
> example, there is an account created automatically called "*Sales
> Tax*" and that seems to cause some problems. I think -- based on
> looking at debugging output -- that GnuCash must be using some
> internal regexp code which doesn't like the * but could easily be
> wrong. Another thing, Q H&B has an account type called "Invoice",
> which GnuCash doesn't like.

A number of bugs have been fixed in the QIF importer, but nothing new
has been done to it in a few years (in terms of features).

> By lurking on the list I was able to learn how to start up GnuCash
> under gdb so I could figure out what was going wrong, and then I
> manually massaged the QIF file till I could get GnuCash to swallow
> it without choking.

I'm surprised that this helps -- the importer is mostly scheme,
which doesn't debug easily.

> In addition to some GnuCash problems with the goofy data, there
> appeared to me also to be some Quicken export problems too. In some
> places after Quicken put in some of these unusualy record types
> (e.g. account type Invoice) it would get stuck and the next record
> would have some unusual/incorect account type. I made some
> corrections there also.

not much we can do about this, I'm afraid.

> Are you aware of any of this? If it is important I could try to
> narrow down the QIF file that fails and get a simple test case,
> unless this is already a solved problem.

Well, we are now.  This is the first *I* have heard about any of
this.  Whether it's "important" is up for debate.  It might be
important to you, it's not directly important to me (I have never
used Quicken or Q H&B).

Getting simple test cases that break the importer are usually useful,
but sometimes there is very little we can actually so about it.  QIF
isn't really a _standard_, and it's REALLY hard to know what Intuit
(or even banks) are doing....

Also the importer does not (and most likely WILL not) understand the
business side...  At this point in time the existing qif-importer is
EOL'ed -- there is a new importer waiting to go into production, but
it, too, does not support the business code.  Unfortunately the author
of both of the importers have long since left the GnuCash project. :(

-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
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available