QIF Import: rounding problems?

[Jon Hamkins]

Derek Brader wrote:

> I'm running into a problem when importing a QIF file from one of my 
> investment companies (Fidelity).  The file contains a bunch of purchases 
> of various commodities (mutual funds, mostly).  The accounts match up 
> just fine for the most part and everything is happy except that many 
> transactions are not properly balanced and end up with a small split to 
> "Imbalance-USD".
> 
> I believe the problem is that Gnucash is calculating the debit amount 
> from the share price and number of shares rather than using the debit 
> value supplied directly.  Since Fidelity rounds off the share price to 
> the nearest cent, this can cause problems.

Yes, you need to direct gnucash to use the share and debit amounts, but 
not the price.  This is an endemic problem in any personal finance 
software, because the QIF file is inherently inconsistent in the sense 
that the shares*price does not exactly equal the debit amount in the QIF 
file.

When you manually enter a transaction, you can tell gnucash to adjust 
the price, and then everything is fine-- the share total matches and the 
debit total matches.  For QIF import, I'm not sure if it is possible to 
tell gnucash to ignore the price in the QIF file.

      ----Jon