Notes on conversion from Quicken to GnuCash

[Alun Champion]

I also made the switch from Quicken about 3 years ago after running
Quicken for personal finances since 1996.
I had a similar experience but it was slightly compounded because of
multi-currency issues, I had lived in the US -> UK and now back to the
US (not sure I landed a 100% on how to handle expenses when you switch
you main currency). And challenges around stocks due to be bought in
one currency but price reported in another and transferred between
brokers, also quite a few were bought before the 01/01/2010 start date
I had chosen for GnuCash.
I didn't create a bogus account just used an Equity account to
transfer money into the asset accounts I was tracking.

I still track at a transaction level, but much of what I need I can
automatically download, so not time consuming.

There have been numerous discussions on tags, project accounting, and
while it's not available I've done similar things to break up the
expense where necessary.


On 30 April 2014 08:54, Jim Thompson <jthomps6 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
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