Switching from Quicken to gnucash.

[David T.]

FWIW, I transferred my Quicken data into GC 2.0.x without any more hitches than
Quicken itself did. GC correctly created all my accounts, and only messed up on
some of the historical stock transactions (more on that later).

My accounts include multiple accounts for checking, savings, credit card,
investment, mutual fund, real assets, and a full complement of expense accounts
which I have developed over the last 18 years in Quicken. They _all_ imported
into GC fine, from one QIF source file (in other words, I did NOT have to
export an account at a time). [Once I got comfortable with GC, I re-arranged a
number of my accounts]

Now, for the big hitch: For many years, I had kept everything in one Quicken
file--until I had a glitch in 1999, and a Quicken rep recommended that I
archive my older transactions. I followed Quicken's directions for splitting
the file up, and all worked well after that. However, when I moved over from a
PC to a Mac, I found that my Quicken data file had hidden transactions that
predated the split. 

I've never gotten a clear explanation of what was going on, but it seems that
Quicken, in order to retain capital gains information, kept transactions that
added or removed stock or mutual fund assets. This played havoc with every
account that had anything connected with stocks or mutual funds, and it took me
a while to clean up the mess.

If I had it to do again, I would probably try to understand more clearly the
accounting principles behind an Opening Balances transaction (my understanding
now is better than it ever was), and set up my Gnucash data file with a
specific start date in mind. 

HTH, 
David

--- Robert Smits <bob at rsmits.ca> wrote:

> On Thursday 09 August 2007 04:45, Charles Stroom wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> No matter how you import it from Quicken, I think you'll have a lot of manual
> 
> work to do to get everything in the correct categories and so on. That's 
> ceratainly been my experience, and I only had one currency to deal with. My 
> suggestion is to use either Wine or CrossOver Linux (my pref) to install your
> 
> old version of Quicken. Then use Quicken to access your old data, and Gnucash
> 
> the new stuff. 
> 
> I find that CrossOver Linux installs Quicken 2002 just fine, but I don't have
> 
> the Dutch version, of course, so your mileage may vary, as they say.
> 
> -- 
> Bob Smits bob at rsmits.ca
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