Switching from Quicken to gnucash.

Charles Stroom charles at stremen.xs4all.nl
Fri Aug 10 17:40:06 EDT 2007


Thanks for a number of comments received so far.  Just to clarify, at
this moment I run my Dutch Quicken under wine, and it runs fine.
However, I do not trust it will run forever as I had problems with
the wine/quicken combi from time to time, when updating linux or wine.
That's also why I would prefer not to have a double system (old under
wine/quicken and new under gnucash), besides it makes searching for old
stuff at some time in the future rather tedious.

I am now considering to combine the QIF files from each account into a
single QIF file before importing to Gnucash.  That would involve
weeding out the multiple-redundant info (I think this could be done with
some scripts), but I don't know how transfers between accounts are
handled in a single multiple-account QIF file.  Has anyone ever tried
this?  Has anyone an example of a qif file where there is a transfer
between 2 accounts having different currencies?  And, my last question
for the moment, how is the "sending" account/currency specified in
multiple account qif files.  The single account qif file does not have
the sending account at all, only the recipient accounts are included.
So, again, if somebody can point me to a small sample file, I would be
grateful.

Cheers,

Charles


On Fri, 10 Aug 2007 10:46:01 -0700 (PDT)
"David T." <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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
> > _______________________________________________
> > gnucash-user mailing list
> > gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> > https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
> > -----
> > Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> > You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
> > 
> 
> 
> 
>        
> ____________________________________________________________________________________
> Sick sense of humor? Visit Yahoo! TV's 
> Comedy with an Edge to see what's on, when. 
> http://tv.yahoo.com/collections/222
> _______________________________________________
> gnucash-user mailing list
> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
> -----
> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.


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


More information about the gnucash-user mailing list