rearranging accounts - backdoor?

[Andrew Sackville-West]

On Sun, Jan 13, 2008 at 04:47:12PM -0700, Brad Haack wrote:
> Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> > On Sat, Jan 12, 2008 at 12:08:46PM -0700, Brad Haack wrote:
> >> Thanks for all of the suggestions.  I took a stab at editing the QIF 
> >> file, but what seemed like the obvious mod, didn't quite work.  I 
> >> gunziped the gnucash file and after a quick look decided that, like I 
> >> was warned, that wasn't practical.  I went thru the normal channels, and 
> >> after hours of mouse clicks I have it pretty close.
> >> Product improvement suggestions:  Currently all quicken categories get 
> >> set to top level accounts, these could default to Expense: or Income: 
> >> sub accts.
> > 
> > THis process is much simpler if you do as others have suggested and
> > create an account tree in the gnucash file *before* importing. Then
> > you can map the incoming accounts list to the existing tree. 
> > 
> > As Charles suggested, there isn't sufficient information in a basic
> > qif file to determine what is expense or income. So that put's you
> > back to mapping the accounts anyway...

...
> > 
> I don't know what the difference btwn a basic qif file and my qif file 
> which was exported from quicken, but every exported quicken category had 
> the correct gnucash type, income or expense, when it was imported so it 
> should be simple to do the translation.

then your qif file must have had the category list in it along with
the transactions. THat's great, and that certainly helps. But it is
certainly possible and frankly common to have a qif filet hat does
*not* contain informatino about the accounts/categories. In that case,
the import could not know about the categories and whether they are
income or expense. That's what I mean by a basic qif file. One that
merely has transactions.

> I'm not an expert at importing 
> qif files, and neither is anyone else who's transitioning from quicken 
> or msmoney, but I don't think it would be much simpler to create the 
> account tree 1st.

Just to run through it for future reference. If you create the account
tree in gnucash first, then during the import, you have the option to
connect the incoming categories to the existing accounts. It's very
straightforward: click on an incoming category, surf through the
existing accoutn tree to find the account it should map to and click
there. Done. Then future imports with the same categories will
automatically line up with those accounts. 

It is less labor intensive (IMO), to do it this way then the click
intensive work of editing existing accoutns to re-parent them into a
different structure. 

YMMV.

A
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/attachments/20080113/35c936f8/attachment.bin