export/import from/to gnucash; and Cost Basis report

[David Carlson]

On 2/11/2013 1:20 AM, David T. wrote:
> David--
>
> GnuCash doesn't have an export feature. Try looking at http://gnucashtoqif.sourceforge.net/ It appears to offer this, but my reading suggests that you'd have to find a way to prune the result, since it appears to work only on complete files.
>
> As for cost basis, try looking at the Advanced Portfolio report. It may successfully give you a cost basis for the mutual fund investment. There have been reported problems with this calculation, but since your account has no sales, the report may work for you.
>
> HTH,
> David
>
> On Feb 10, 2013, at 8:44 PM, David Zelinsky <dzpost at dedekind.net> wrote:
>
>> I have the following problem.  For the past few years I have been
>> keeping track of some mutual funds held in a custodial account for my
>> daughter, who is now old enough to handle it herself.  She already has a
>> gnucash account tree that she uses for her bank acount and budgeting,
>> but now she wants to add accounts for the mutual funds.  Meanwhile, I
>> have all the data for the funds in my own gnucash file.
>>
>> QUESTION 1 -- How can I export the mutual fund accounts data from my
>> gnucash file in a form that she can import to her gnucash file?
>>
>> The only Export option I see is "Export Accounts", but that only exports
>> Account metadata, not the transactions.  It's the transactions that I'm
>> concerned about.  Plus, I don't care about all transactions, just the
>> ones involving the mutual funds in question.  (I realize there would
>> complications in dealing with all the splits, but still it would be
>> useful.)  I suppose I could write a perl script (or something) to parse
>> the Transaction Report and produce a qfx file that could be imported to
>> gnucash, but that seems like an enormous kludge.
>>
>> Lacking an easy method to transfer all the dividend reinvestment
>> transactions from my file to my daughter's, the other option I
>> considered is having her start with an Opening Balance transaction,
>> consisting of a purchase of the current balance of shares, at a price
>> equal to the current average cost basis of the account.  Which brings me
>> to:
>>
>> QUESTION 2: Is there a way (e.g. a report) to get gnucash to calculate
>> the average cost basis?
>>
>> Obviously I can do it by hand (add up all the purchase amounts), but
>> that seems pointlessly tedious and error-prone.  I've read descriptions
>> of methods to report cost basis in conjunction with a sale transaction,
>> but I don't have a sale transaction; plus I've read that this method
>> only uses FIFO, not average cost.
>>
>> I'm surprised there is no available report that calculates average cost
>> basis.  Is that really true?  If so I may have to figure out how to use
>> the report API so I can write one.
>>
>> -- 
>> David Zelinsky
>> dzpost at dedekind.net
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I seem to recall that some users have found a way to generate a report,
import it into a spreadsheet, edit it a little, then import it into a
gnucash file.  Search the FAQs in the Gnucash website.

David C
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