Quicken to GnuCash (Windows)

[Charles Day]

Hello,

I have been using Quicken for more than 15 years, and while it is a
generally decent program on a day-to-day basis, there are some areas
which have been buggy, incomplete, or otherwise unacceptable for quite
a few years now. Plus, Intuit is an arrogant company that provides
poor support, sunsets earlier versions very quickly (and stops
providing bug fixes even faster), rarely provides any significant
innovation in new versions (which I effectively am forced to buy), and
puts up fences around its user base. Plus, the software is cluttered
up with advertising.

But you probably know all this.

I'd like to get out of Quicken and find something better. I'm testing
GnuCash on Windows XP to see if it will work out for me. I may move to
Linux at some point, but for now I am testing on Windows only. I do
use Linux on some older machines that I have.

My main aims are:
-Import all data. This is non-negotiable as I don't want any data to
remain in proprietary form and I want to be able to run reports across
many years.
-Successfully and securely downloading transactions from the same
institutions that work in Quicken
-Successfully downloading investment price updates (stocks & mutual funds)
-Securing all financial data with strong encryption (e.g. data files)

I began by exporting all data from Quicken Premier 2006 in QIF format.
All accounts, transactions, memorized payees, security lists, category
lists – the works – went into a single QIF file.  GnuCash 2.2.1
installed on Windows XP without incident. Then I started going through
the QIF import process. I encountered a number of user interface
issues, which I may go into in a separate post, but for now I'll
inquire only about the most serious setbacks.

First, I have accounts in several currencies, and GnuCash doesn't
import the transfers between these accounts correctly. I see from
earlier posts that this is a known problem, and since I have less than
fifty transactions of this kind, I can resort to fixing them by hand.
On this topic though, I would suggest that if the import program knows
that a transaction involves two different currencies, then it should
allow matching by date and description, and ignore the price
difference (caused by the exchange rate).

Second and more importantly, three Quicken investment transaction
types were not recognized by the QIF importer: "ContribX", "WithdrwX",
and "Cash".  These are simple transaction types that ought to pose no
challenge to the importer. "ContribX" is a transfer into a
tax-advantaged investment account, such as an IRA or 401(k).
"WithdrwX" is a transfer in the other direction. These are the
tax-advantaged versions of "XIn" and "XOut", which the importer
already supports. The third transaction type, "Cash", is a transfer
between an investment account and an expense account. I believe that
this is the same as "MiscExp", which the importer already supports.
With any luck, fixing this may only require several tiny changes to
the importer's parsing code. In the meantime, I'll try replacing
ContribX with XIn everywhere in the QIF and see if those magically
begin importing.

The third and most serious problem is that none of the dividend
reinvestment transactions appear to have made it into GnuCash. The
buys and sells of these securities look fine, but the dividend
reinvestments are nowhere to be seen. I searched the user mailing list
archives but couldn't find anything that addressed this; perhaps I
used unlucky search terms.

Can anyone help or comment on these issues?

Cheers,
Charles