QIF import -- best practices?

David T. sunfish62 at yahoo.com
Mon May 17 03:08:46 EDT 2010


Tony--

I don't know about #1; I seem to recall that was how I did it back in the day...

As for #2, I use your approach regularly; the QIF import Account selector is clunky for me, and I find it's not too difficult to open up the Imbalances account and change transaction accounts there until the Imbalances account is empty (since transactions neatly disappear from the register as you change them to their real accounts).

You might want to see if you can get OFX working. It has a much nicer import matching routine.

David

--- On Sun, 5/16/10, Anthony Dardis <adardis at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Anthony Dardis <adardis at gmail.com>
> Subject: QIF import -- best practices?
> To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> Date: Sunday, May 16, 2010, 11:57 AM
> 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
> 
> 
> 
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