rearranging accounts - backdoor?

[Charles Day]

On Jan 13, 2008 4:48 PM, Andrew Sackville-West <andrew at swclan.homelinux.org>
wrote:

> 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.
>

When you ask Quicken to export a QIF file, you have a choice whether to
include a category list or not.  It's optional.  If you *do* choose to
include one then GnuCash *ought* to automatically identify which categories
become income accounts and which are expense accounts, but it doesn't.

-Charles


>
> 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
>
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