Anyone successfully imported from Money 2000?

[risterian]

risterian <en9e-60hk at dea.spamcon.org> wrote:

>I've been wanting to try GnuCash for a long time, finally tried
>V2.4.5 a few weeks ago (on Windows XP - will move to Linux
>eventually).  But I wasn't successful in attempting to import
>from Money 2000.
>
>I found that an important aspect is left out of the GnuCash FAQ
>entry on Money: if you have closed any accounts in Money, they
>will NOT show up as available for export.  Thus when I was done,
>things were way off (though there could be other problems).
>
>So, I have reopened all my closed accounts, but before I again
>spend many tedious hours exporting and importing, I would like to
>know if it's worth it - has anyone successfully done it, and if
>so, any other tricks that aren't in the FAQ?
>
>I noticed that there seems to be no exporting from Money
>available for Loans.  Won't that throw off the import into
>GnuCash?
>
>Once set up, can GnuCash show the "total return" on each stock?
>That is, if dividends (cash or reinvested) are manually entered
>as received, can it show the total return (original cost vs.
>current market value plus dividends) like Money?
>

I'm replying to my own post over a year later (nobody else replied).

I'd given up after my previous attempt and put it aside.

I tried again, spent most of this Labor Day weekend and the 
following week taking another run at moving from Money 2000 to 
GnuCash (now 2.4.11), and after much manual work, got it going, 
for the most part.

I thought I'd share what I found, along with the FAQ info:
http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/FAQ#Q:_How_do_I_import_my_data_from_Microsoft_Money.3F

- The export and import process is extremely tedious in both 
  Money and GnuCash.  Each one is multiple steps individually for 
  each account.

  - GnuCash gives an error on empty accounts (accounts with no
    transactions).  I expected it to just warn that it's empty 
    and skip it.

  - If all the dates in an account are in certain ranges, the 
    importer can't figure out the date format, and prompts for 
    it.

  - The tip about setting up stocks in advance in the Securities
    Editor did not seem to help during import, I still had to 
    give data for every security one by one.

- Fixups: 

  - Numerous accounts were marked as Income that should have been 
    Expense, and vice-versa; I reviewed one by one and changed them 
    via Edit Account.

  - I had a few Loan accounts; created accounts and balancing 
    entries manually, luckily there wasn't too much of this.

  - Opening balances ended up in Equity:Retained Earnings, I 
    reviewed every account and moved such things to 
    Equity:Opening Balances.

    - A number of accounts had an Opening Balance entry that was 
      bogus, deleted these.

    - Others were missing an opening balance, when Money had one.

  - Reorganize into a better account tree structure.

  - Went through every account, compared to Money accounts, did 
    fixing as needed, such as:

    - Manually set up the Price Editor so there's a matching 
      price to the last one Money has for each stock.  Lots
      of other messing around in investment accounts to get
      things to match up.

      - Main one is that splits not handled right - in Money
        screens, it "backports" splits so on the screen it shows 
        the stock and price as if the split were in effect at the 
        original purchase point.  But it seems the QIF has the 
        original share quantities, that's what GnuCash shows.  I 
        just changed the GnuCash shares to the current split 
        amounts and let it adjust the price, which then matched
        what Money shows, instead of trying to add split events 
        to the stocks.

      - The other one was the way transactions ended up in
        brokerage cash accounts, vs. the overall (containing)
        brokerage account - fixed by adding adjusting 
        transactions between the two accounts so that the cash 
        account value is correct.

      - Adjusting some prices very slightly so that all amounts
        match to the penny.

    - A couple accounts with just an opening balance, no 
      transactions - these were skipped in import - had to create 
      them.

    - CDs were treated as stock, change them to cash.

- Memo (text notes/comments) were not always brought over.

Finally, the Net Assets shown at the bottom of the main GnuCash 
screen match the Net Worth in the Money 2000 Net Worth report.

The Income and Expenses don't quite match up but are less than 1% 
difference, good enough for me, not worth pursuing further.