Switching from Quicken to gnucash.

Charles Stroom charles at stremen.xs4all.nl
Thu Aug 9 07:45:05 EDT 2007


Greetings,

I have been using several versions of Quicken in succession over the
last 12 years and from time to time I have tried to convert to gnucash
without much success so far.  The last version I tried was gnucash 2.2.
I do not want to lose my financial history, so all quicken accounts
have to be imported.

My current version of Quicken is a Dutch version, which was only very
shortly on the market around the time of introduction of the euro (Jan
2002).  I have about 30+ accounts, say about 12 before 1 Jan 2002 in
Dutch guilders and the same accounts after that date in euros, because
a single account cannot have double currencies (and of course the
transfers between at the time of change-over). Then I have also a number
of cash accounts with foreign currencies, which have transfers between
the foreign account and the Dutch bank account, used for getting the
foreign currency.

The dutch quicken does not allow a single QIF file to be exported, and
thus all accounts are dumped into a single qif file.

When trying gnucash, firstly I imported all NLG accounts in one go; that
was not too bad.  Of course, it also created the other accounts, because
there were transfers between them.  I modified the generated
accounts, to specify the foreign currencies.

Problems:
When importing the NLG accounts, all transfers between the NLG accounts
and the generated foreign currency accounts are wrong, because the
import did not take into account that in fact they were foreign
currencies.  For example, a transfer of 100 guilders from the dutch
bank account into the dollar account appeared as 100 dollars in the
dollar account.  OK, I could manually go through all transfers and
eventually correct them, but it is a pain.

The second, major problem came when I imported the first foreign
currency account (dollars in this case), because it generated all my
categories as doubles (with the addition of "2") because of a "QIF
import: Name conflict with another account".  There are so many, that
there is no way to correct that manually!

While importing, it says that all qif files to be important must have
the same currency, but this is "soon" to be changed.  I think I had
seen that message in previous versions, but would it solve all my
problems and, if so, when can this option be expected?  Or have I
overlooked something and are there other tricks to be done first before
importing?

Regards,

Charles

p.s. just for information: the Dutch version of quicken uses its own
version of the qif format, where "CS" means "reconciled", rather than
the standard "CX" or "Cx". That problem was solved with an awk script.  

-- 
Charles Stroom
email: charles at no-spam.stremen.xs4all.nl (remove the "no-spam.")


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