Imported invoices and other problems...

[Charles Day]

On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 10:49 PM, defaria <Andrew at defaria.com> wrote:

>
>
> Charles Day wrote:
> > Keep in mind that the QIF format is almost completely undocumented. To
> > support importing of QIF invoices, we'd first have to know what that even
> > looks like. I've worked on GnuCash's QIF importer for over a year (two?)
> > and I've never seen a single example. My guess is that you will not find
> > any decent explanation of this anywhere.
>
> Looks like you haven't lifted a single finger in an effort to find out!
> Indeed - do you Google at all? If you did you'd come across
>
> http://www.google.com/search?q=qif+file+format&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a
> .
> Therein are various links to descriptions of the QIF file format including
> a
> Wikipedia entry. This is not at all what I would term "completely
> undocumented" leading me to wonder how a developer supposedly working on
> the
> Gnucash's QIF importer would be totally ignorant of such things!!! Is it
> "fully documented" - I'll give you that perhaps it isn't. But surely it's
> not "completely undocumented"! Indeed anybody who gives the issue an itoa
> of
> thought would realize that you obviously have figured out what's in a QIF
> file, being the guy who maintained the importer and the fact that Gnucash
> does indeed import QIF files. Sure I guess the whole thing could have been
> 100% reversed engineered but even I knew better that that!
>

I have read many Internet sources about the QIF format. Are you kidding me?
I even helped write the GnuCash one. What I don't think you'll find is the
format of INVOICES in QIF format.  For INVOICES, I believe this is
essentially a voyage of discovery. If you can find some information on that,
please reply with the link.


>
> Even worse, I'd bet that invoices are not really exported from Quicken with
> all the required information, making it impossible to import what Quicken
> cannot export.
>
> It may very well be the case that there's not enough information in a QIF
> file about invoices to do anything useful with them - hence my suggestion
> (for the people who wish to blame me - note this is a suggestion not a
> demand) to at least give a warning if the account name contained the word
> "Invoice". To me it's a better thing to do than to import stuff which will
> obviously be perceived as incorrect.
>
>
> However, if you would like to provide a sample QIF file containing
> invoices,
> that might be very helpful.
>
> I'm not really getting the feeling that you guys are taking me seriously or
> that you seriously wish to work together to get things working better. Let
> me know if my perception is wrong.


As I said before, I've never seen an example of a QIF file containing
invoices. If you provide one, that would be helpful.

-Charles