QIF import -- best practices?

[Anthony Dardis]

Hi, all,

I'm new to GnuCash, just started using it a couple of weeks ago.  
Everything looks/works/feels great, more or less.

I've done two imports using the QIF (Quicken) format, and wondered if  
there was a better way to operate.

1. I imported all my data from Quicken 2009 for Windows. Rather than  
trying to tell the import process where exactly I wanted the transactions,  
I just let it import them. So I ended up -- for example -- with a whole  
lot of top-level accounts, one for every kind of expense I ever had in  
Quicken, etc. Then I edited the accounts to move them to their right  
places in a standard accounts tree, so I have things like  
Expenses:Household:Propane.

This seemed to me to have a few advantages. You probably already have  
mini-trees in Quicken, so you can just edit the top of each mini-tree and  
the whole thing goes where it belongs. I know GnuCash remembers what you  
put in to the import conversion dialogue, but I haven't seen a generic  
editor for that table. So if I tried to do it all during the import, I'd  
be sitting there for hours typing in new account names (for example, to  
move Propane to Expenses:Household:Propane). Also, I did need to do some  
thinking about what the accounts tree should look like as I moved my old  
accounts around, and that works much better once everything is actually in  
the program. And, of course, there were various uglinesses in the Quicken  
categories I had let grow in the shadows over the years.

(I've used Quicken for more than 10 years, and as a result there were a  
couple of serious cleaning up operations to do. The Quicken data file I  
exported was the result of closing the Quicken year at the beginning of  
2008. I had a big loan I paid off some time several years earlier than  
that, but the export brought over a bunch of transactions for it (I guess  
because it was an account I never reconciled). Something similar happened  
with my employer's contributions to my retirement, there were tons of  
transactions there from before the 2008 beginning of year. In both cases I  
just deleted all the offending transactions, and I think that brought  
everything into balance.)

2. My bank allows exporting transactions in QIF. I imported a bunch of new  
transactions this way. I told the importer what account they should go to  
(it correctly figured out that they all went to one, and asked what its  
name was). The import asks for the other side account for the  
transactions. Since the bank's export only provides a memo field, there  
were 30-40 transactions that each separately needed an account; and the  
process of specifying an account in this dialogue requires a lot of  
clicking and choosing. So instead I just let the import put them all in  
Unspecified, and then once they were there, it was much easier to fill in  
the needed account.

Cheers,

Tony