Quicken to GnuCash (Windows)

[Charles Day]

Thanks for the advice!

On Nov 26, 2007 7:41 AM, Andrew Sackville-West <ajswest at mindspring.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 24, 2007 at 04:32:01PM -0800, Charles Day wrote:
> > -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.
>

As long as anything within gnucash's control doesn't contribute to
security holes during downloads, that's all I can expect.

> > -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'll start by using TrueCrypt to create a secure partition, since I am
already family with it, but I can't say that this method really
satisfies. Once mounted, the financial data becomes cleartext to any
program (e.g. viruses). Is there a solution that makes the unencrypted
data only available to gnucash?

> >
> > 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.
>

The import process is actually going reasonably well!  Here's an
update on the three main issues I was having:

ISSUE #1
=======
Problem: QIF importer doesn't support multiple currencies.
Status: This will need to be addressed by the development team, but
the transaction count is small enough that I can fix them by hand. I'm
not worried about this.


ISSUE #2
=======
Problem: ContribX, WithdrwX, and Cash transactions aren't recognized
by the QIF importer
Status: I created a patch for this. ContribX can be treated as an Xin.
WithdrwX can be treated as an XOut. Cash can be treated as a MiscInc
(not MiscExp, due to a negative sign). So I changed the scheme code in
src/import-export/qif-import/qif-parse.scm (shown below) and it all
now imports correctly. How can this be followed up, so that the
changes can be considered for a future release?

# diff qif-parse.scm.patched qif-parse.scm
234c234
<    ((miscinc cash)
---
>    ((miscinc)
266c266
<    ((xin contribx)
---
>    ((xin)
268c268
<    ((xout withdrwx)
---
>    ((xout)


ISSUE #3
=======
Problem: Can't find any dividend reinvestments after QIF import
Status: The dividend reinvestment transactions actually came over OK;
I just was looking for them in the wrong place. Quicken user's are
used to seeing these in the investment account's main register, but in
GnuCash they actually show up in a subaccount for the security, which
makes perfect sense. I'm sure this won't be the last time that a
Quicken user wonders where their dividend reinvestments went. What can
I say except "RTFM"...

Cheers,
Charles