mutual funds: some qif import problems

[Jim Dory]

hello, new to the list and hoping I can make the switch from win98 and 
an older Quicken (6?) to linux and gnucash. And unfortunately I don't 
know about accounting practices well, or proper terminology.

I'm on Suse 8.2 and after some crashes on gnucash, grabbed the 1.8.4 
version. The problems I'm having could very well be the perhaps improper 
way I set up the quicken funds. I'm on my lunch break right now so don't 
have time to lay this out very well, but will start with one or two 
questions.

First, overall the import on several accounts went very well, except for 
a few duplicate transactions I had to remove. I have a couple check 
accounts and savings, as well as several mutual funds. (I don't write 
many checks anymore). Plus a few credit cards and some other accounts 
I'm tracking.

One question I have is this: Each single mutual fund imported into 
gnucash with a parent account and subaccount. Usually the parent account 
shows $0 with no transactions, and all the transactions are in the 
sub-accounts. There's a couple funds that whenever I used the quicken 
'sell X' or is it 'sell shares' instead of shares out, those 
transactions are in the parent account. Is this normal behavior?

For instance, recently one mutual fund was eliminated by its company and 
all the shares were transferred into another mutual fund in that 
account. For right or wrong, I chose to enter the transaction as sell 
shares for the old mutual fund and buy shares for the new that they were 
being transferred to. These transactions are recorded in the parent 
account in gnucash for the mutual funds in question, whereas all the 
shares-out or buy-x are in the sub-account. This makes accounting 
difficult for me.

I tried going back to quicken and re-entering those transactions as 
shares-out instead of sell-shares so I could re-export to gnucash, but 
the danged totals went wrong in quicken so I bagged it.

I don't have so many transactions that I couldn't just remove all the 
mutual fund accounts in gnucash and rebuild from scratch. I have enough 
that I don't really want to, but maybe someone could let me know what I 
may be doing wrong, or if gnucash is supposed to have the two accounts 
per mutual fund. What happens if I delete these mutual fund accounts - 
what happens to the transactions in the checking/saving accounts for the 
transactions that transferred funds to the accounts? Is this the 
'imbalance' account they go to? I assume I can reclassify them when I 
get the mutual funds rebuilt, if I have to go that route.

Another question: All those mutual funds show in the accounts window 
with their totals as a sum of the shares owned followed by the name of 
the fund. Is this the way it is supposed to show?

Appreciate anyone's extreme patience if they so choose to help. I've 
been reading through the archives to see what I can find, but since they 
don't appear to be searchable online I haven't spent a large amount of 
time there.

cheers, Jim