SETTING UP A NEW ACCOUNT USING INFO FROM PEACHTREE ACCOUNTING

[Michael Hendry]

On 7 Dec 2013, at 01:25, Tim Smith <tim7654321 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi
> I am new to gnucash and i would like to import an exisiting business that
> is in Sage Peachtree Complete Accounting 2012.
> Is there an easy way?
> Thanks,
> Tim

I can’t help you with the Peachtree export/import question, but I was in a similar situation in making a transition from TAS Books (Windows) to Gnucash (Ubuntu) in 2010.

There being no import path as far as I could see, I opted for a year of parallel running, dropping TAS in 2011, but keeping the software and the data files (dating back to 1993) so that I could answer any queries about earlier transactions. I’m now running Gnucash on a Mac, with a cloned copy of TAS running in a Windows XP virtual machine when I need it.

Although I was duplicating the keying-in work, I gained valuable experience in using Gnucash while having the security blanket of a familiar book-keeping system in the background, and I was able to compare TAS and GC reports and fix errors.

Is there any compelling reason for you to have all the Peachtree data copied across to Gnucash? In my experience, accountants aren’t interested in previous years’ books, and would prefer me to start with a clean sheet for any given year, with starting balances they’ve calculated at the end of the previous year, so if you have a working copy of Peachtree available, with the past years’ files, you can do as I did.

Automated import is always attractive, but can generate a cascade of hard-to-track problems - you may have been following threads on imports of transactions from banks and from the stock market and seen the difficulties they may bring with them.

Michael