Quickbooks to GnuCash conversion

[Thomas Bullock]

Hi Laura,

Thanks for the reply and distinction between lists and transactions.  I will have to follow your idea of isolating the transactions via a custom transaction report and export that to excel to see what I have to deal with.

I did use calc2qif to see how that worked and it does.  My effort at the moment is to get a handle on the number and style of IIF records and now of the kinds of transactions I have in my data files.  Since I don't use all the features of QB (at least I think I don't), then whatever I end up with will have to be enhanced to cover all the record types, transactions, etc that QB uses and that I don't know about.

I appreciate your offer of help and am glad to accept.  So I will contact you off line about the details of the project.

Tom

From: Laura Lincoln [mailto:cblist1 at gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, May 11, 2009 9:32 AM
To: Thomas Bullock
Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Subject: Re: Quickbooks to GnuCash conversion


On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 7:42 AM, Thomas Bullock <tbullock at nd.edu<mailto:tbullock at nd.edu>> wrote:

Replying to Laura's message of 5/6, reported in Vol 74, Issue 12:



Hi Laura,





In the above message you said:

-----

"I recently converted a client from QuickBooks to GnuCash when she purchased

a Dell laptop with Ubuntu installed.



"There is no conversion method so I had to enter a large journal entry with

the ending Trial balance from 12/31/08 adjusted for any outstanding checks

and invoices. I then entered the outstanding entries and arrived back to the

Trial balance I started with.



"You do lose your details of the QuickBooks file if you don't have access to

that file any longer but unless you want to reenter the detail into GnuCash

you don't have many options.





"Check the board's archives for the past couple of weeks. I seem to recall

this discussion and the other option is to export the transactions to excel

and use a third party tool to create IIF files from that output. The IIF

file is then imported into GnuCash."



-----

Because of what you describe above and the fact I have been using QB for many years, I am working on developing a QB to GnuCash conversion program so I can load my data into GnuCash.  It is taking a lot of time and I don't know when it will get done.



Having explained my interest, I want to request a clarification of your last paragraph.  As far as I know Quick Books creates IIF output and Quicken QIF format records.  So it seems to me that you want QuickBooks to export its IIF transactions into Excel.  Then you open the Excel file and save a copy of that file into CSV (comma separated values) format.  That CSV file then is input to the third party tool, and the tool creates QIF format records that get imported to Gnucash.  Do I have that right?  Or am I misunderstanding something?



The fact that you have succesfully converted from QB to Gnucash looms large in my mind and I want to be sure I understand exactly what you mean.



TIA



Tom Bullock


I posted this via the news server yesterday but I don't see it posted today. I apologise in advance if this gets posted twice.

You are close. QuickBooks will not export transactions to an IIF format. It
only exports lists to IIF format. If you need to convert transactions to a
QIF then you would need to run a report such as the Custom transaction
report and export it to excel. Then you will need a third party tool to
create the QIF file to be imported into GnuCash then you'd need a tool to
create that file.

I have not tried it but here is one excel to QIF addon:
http://xl2qif.chez-alice.fr/xl2qif_en.php that is free. There is also a
Calc2Qif macro available on that site to be used in open office.

These tools might handle checks and credit card payments without too many
problems but I don't know how it will handle bills/bill payments or
invoices/customer payments. That might be worth messing around with.

This might be worth my time experimenting to see if I can set up another
GnuCash file for my client. That way she has a historic file in GC if she
ever needs to look up something from the past 2 years now that she no longer
has access to her QB file.

You have my e-mail address...if you would like to contact me offlist to discuss this further or want a guinea pig to help test your conversion, please feel free to contact me.