Quicken to GnuCash (Windows)

[Andrew Sackville-West]

On Sat, Nov 24, 2007 at 04:32:01PM -0800, Charles Day wrote:

... snip Quicken Sucks... ;)

I've read all this over a couple times. let me start out by saying, I
*think* gnucash can do all you're asking in terms of day-to-day
interaction. It will take some work to get it all going, but once that
work is done, it should do the job going forward.

> 
> 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.

Having come from quickbooks myself with several years of business
data, I can tell you this is much easier said than done. more below. 

> -Successfully and securely downloading transactions from the same
> institutions that work in Quicken

depends on the institution and how their downloading works. you'll
have to investigate this on your own or get input from others.

> -Successfully downloading investment price updates (stocks & mutual
   funds)

read up on Finance::Quote.

> -Securing all financial data with strong encryption (e.g. data
   files)

this functionality is not provided by gnucash, but their are many ways
to encrypt your information. The easiest would be to store the
information on some sort of encrypted media (maybe another partition
or a usb key) such that you provide the encryption key when you mount
the partition. I'm willing to be this is much easier done in linux
than windows, but I don't do windows, so can't really comment beyond
that.

> 
> 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. 

this is where you're going to run into problems. I don't think you'll
get it to work doing it all as one big import. And some of this stuff
just flat won't import. When I moved my stuff from quickbooks, I did
it in stages. I started with just the account structure. Then I
followed up with the major accounts (checking accounts, money market
accounts, etc). Then I used subsequent smaller imports to fill in the
holes. 

For me this was a trial and error process as I determined what was
working or not working and what the trade-offs were in terms of work
required versus amount of information retained. Ultimately I ended up
sacrificing some past information in exchange for not spending
unending hours recreating transactions. But that's me and your mileage
may vary. 

I know I've not provided more than just general advice, but hopefully,
it helps.

A
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