Notes on conversion from Quicken to GnuCash

[Jim Thompson]

Greetings,

After 18+ years on Quicken, decided it was time to try converting to
GnuCash.  My experience was mostly pleasant and I'm about ready to say
farewell to Quicken.

Although I'm a newbie, thought I'd share my experience for others who might
be contemplating conversion from Quicken.  Perhaps someone will benefit
from these notes.

First a bit of background... In Quicken we also had various closed accounts
- old brokerage and checking accounts.  The brokerage account in Quicken
was tedious to maintain... with each monthly statement, felt compelled to
enter all the transactions, such as reinvested dividends, plus buy and sell
transactions.  I felt the need to enter all that stuff so that taxes would
be easier to compute (it was against my religion to pay the broker for the
right to download my data).

Last year we cleaned up our finances, closing the brokerage account and
moving to a new financial advisor.  No longer interested in all the
details, we just monitor the new investment stuff via the web but don't
record any details in Quicken or GnuCash.  Data on the annual statements is
adequate for US tax purposes.

So, we only had 15 Quicken accounts that we still cared to track - bank
accounts, credit cards and cash.  Ran Quicken exports to create 15 QIF
files and imported them into GnuCash. The only questions that came up
during the imports were to let GnuCash know that the dates were in M-D-Y
format.

Since GC does double entry accounting, we had a little fun with the
imports.  For example, our cash account had transfers (withdrawals) from
those closed checking accounts... so, although we had tried to ignore the
closed checking accounts, they showed up - and only contained the
transactions that were linked to cash (or any imported account).  Likewise
the brokerage account just showed the final withdrawal.  So we had a
handful of accounts with negative balances.  Those closed (and negative)
accounts resulted in GC showing a negative net worth.

The fix for the negative balances wasn't too tough.  Created an additional
account in GC named "bogus" with an opening balance equal to the total of
the negatives. Then did transfers from "bogus" to each old account until
they were all zero.

Also did some organizing of accounts in GC - creating the following
"placeholder" top level accounts, then moving detail accounts where they
belong.

- Bank
- Credit
- Exp (expenses)
- Inc (income)
- X-closed

I still had a large bogus total in Equity, so marked Equity and X-closed as
Hidden - leaving visible just the stuff we still care about.  Another side
bonus for those top level placeholder accounts - one can put the focus on
Credit and find all the purchases from a given store in all credit cards at
once.

Overall a positive experience although there were a few losses from
Quicken.

It is easy to nest sub-acconts in GC, so we have:

Exp:Auto:Fuel:VehicleX

In Quicken I had Auto:Fuel but used tags for each vehicle.  The tags didn't
get imported by GC, so spent some time looking at Quicken data in order to
tune up the data from the last few years in GC.  Didn't go all the way
back, but I now have fairly recent data for Exp:Auto:Fuel:VehicleX,
Exp:Auto:Fuel:VehicleY as well as ...Purchase:VehicleX/Y and
...Service:VehicleX/Y  I did not repeat this exercise for Clothing... but I
know my part of that pie is maybe 10% or less - and in the interest of
domestic tranquility feel no need to pin more precise numbers on my spouse
;)

One could perhaps do more prep work in Quicken, before exporting QIFs, if
the tags are important enough.

There are a few places where one might imagine some enhancements to GC, but
may spend more time poking around before posting some questions or
suggestions.

Of course our current setup is fairly vanilla, but it's working pretty well
so far.  Running GC on iMac and MacBook Air - GC files are in kept in synch
via Dropbox.

Cheers,
Jim