Importing from Quicken

[Charles Day]

On Sun, Mar 2, 2008 at 7:30 AM, Steve <zephod at cfl.rr.com> wrote:

> Sorry for the long delay before replying.
>
> ---- Charles Day <cedayiv at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 9:39 AM, <zephod at cfl.rr.com> wrote:
> >
> > > I am a new GnuCash user having recently moved from Quicken since they
> are
> > > doing their extortion trick of forcing you to upgrade or lose the
> ability to
> > > download stock prices which really come from Yahoo. Grrrr.
> > >
> > > <Deep breath>Anyway, I have about 15yrs of data that I imported in GC
> and
> > > I had 2 main problems during the import.
> > >
> > > 1) I got messages that some transactions were deleted because they
> were
> > > not supported in GC. These all turned out to be stock shorts and their
> > > corresponding covers. Is shorting stock really not supported and if
> the
> > > answer is yes, then how do I go about reconciling the brokerage
> account that
> > > contains these transactions?
> > >
> >
> > Shorts and covers aren't supported by the current QIF importer, but if
> you
> > can provide a sample QIF file, or at least a few sample transactions,
> I'd be
> > happy to take a look at it. And by all means, if you find anything else
> in
> > your QIF that doesn't import correctly, let us know.
>
> You say shorts and covers aren't supported by the QIF importer but you
> imply that they supported by GC at all? How do I go about entering a short
> transaction?
>

That is a good question. I have not tried to enter shorts or covers in
GnuCash. Off the top of my head, it seems like you would need a "Borrowed
Shares:Security Name" liability account for which the underlying "commodity"
(GnuCash term) is the security being sold short. Transfer shares from that
account into your portfolio and immediately sell them. That would be the
short, leaving you with the cash you got from the sale plus a liability of
the borrowed shares.  For the cover, buy shares for the liability account.


> I'm well beyong the import stage now and I'm not going to go back and do
> it again but if you want me to pull out a short transaction from the QIF
> file to help with future GC revisions, I can do that.
>

Yes, if you can pull out a short transaction and a cover, I'll see how hard
it would be to import them. At the very least I can use them to file a
request for enhancement.

-Charles

> 2) After the import was finished, I reorganized my accounts so that they
> are
> > > all subaccounts of the 4 main accounts: assets, liabilities, income or
> > > expenses. There was no equity account so I just created one. How can I
> get
> > > this equity account to show my net worth assuming that I am correct in
> > > thinking that is what this account is for?
> > >
> >
> > The equity accounts don't show your net worth. They are used to add or
> > remove money from an accounting period. Since you're coming from
> Quicken,
> > you're probably not using accounting periods, so your period is
> "forever".
> > So what you'll see in your Equity accounts is value added or removed
> from
> > GnuCash, such as opening balances and any shares you've added/removed
> > without doing a buy/sell (ShrsIn and ShrsOut in your .QIF).
> >
> > You don't say which version of GnuCash you are using, but there were
> quite a
> > few QIF importer fixes included in 2.2.3, particularly for investments,
> and
> > quite a few more to be included with 2.2.4 (soon to be released).
>
> I'm using GC 2.2.3 on an F8 system.
>
> Steve
>