QuickBooks to GnuCash

[Dean Gibson]

Oh, no!  Not another "QuickBooks to GnuCash" thread !!!

Well, after trying the steps documented at 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicken_Interchange_Format#Export_Hacks_for_QuickBooks:_exporting_to_QIF 
and obtaining http://xl2qif.chez-alice.fr/xl2qif_en.php , I found the 
latter wasn't really suitable for output from QuickBooks, so I wrote my 
own converter using Linux's AWK program.

The Linux script is here: http://www.ultimeth.com/download/Tsv2Qif.sh -- 
it's about 50 lines of AWK commands and about 40 lines of "how-to".  The 
"how-to" is displayed if you invoke the script without any parameters.

The only hard work is changing the account type for each account in 
GnuCash after the import.  Since each fixed asset was a different QB 
account, the reorganization took a while, but was otherwise trivial.

Suggestions / comments / improvements welcome !!!

-- Dean

ps:  I sure wish I'd found out about GnuCash years earlier.  I bought QB 
2003 back then.  QB is a nice package, except for the proprietary DB 
(your data for ANYTHING should NEVER be in a format you can't easily 
export), and the fact that Intuit wants another $200 every three years, 
just so you can continue to download bank transactions.  So, I was even 
considering writing my own (in Java).  I wrote my own years ago in COBOL 
and that was trivial, but the hard part these days is just the sheer 
amount of work to design a reasonable GUI.

Now, Quicken is another story:  it's buggy and non-intuitive (no pun 
intended), and has the same "every 3-year upgrade hook".  Fortunately, 
that import into GnuCash went easily, and I am rid of that terrible 
beast forever.  It might be different if Quicken was suitably integrated 
with TurboTax, but amazingly, they are not.

Oh, and I don't miss the ads, either.