coming from Quicken Cashbook

[Mike or Penny Novack]

Jmathew07 wrote:

>I imported all my data from Quicken about 20 years worth into Gnucash.
>The resulting XML file is about 4Mb.
>
>Now Gnucash is slow to open.  If I hit the report button it really is slow.
>
>  
>
Could I make a suggestion. I can well understand why you would want to 
have your historical data accessible from within gnucash WHEN IT IS 
NEEDED. But I would also expect that such times would be few and far 
between and so the price (in time) for current bookkeeping rather high. 
So this is a situation where you possibly COULD ...........

1) Run a Balance Sheet Report as of the start of a prior accounting 
period. Ideally done right at the end of an accounting period (so you 
might have to the "slow" until then.In this case you would want to have 
done a "close the books" operation.

2) Create a new set of gnucash books using this Balance Sheet for your 
opening the books data.

3) Rename the files (the books) to something meaningful like "Pre 201x" 
and "Post 201x".

Now you use the the new set of books to enter current and future 
transactions and it should be a much smaller and so faster to open file. 
But if and when you need to refer to the older data you can open that 
set of books (treat it as "read only" in terms of transactions).

That is what I would do in your situation. You data (the books) are NOT 
part of the program and gnucash can handle a number of different sets of 
books, just open the correct file.

Michael D Novack