Getting Started

[Michael Churchill]

Hi Joseph,
I did roughly what you are contemplating.  I imported 15 years of 
Quicken data - banking and investments - via QIF a few months ago. 
Basically it worked, but I found that my use of categories in Quicken 
had been rather sloppy, and gnucash was not very tolerant of that.

I believe my accounts were usable almost immediately, but going back in 
time was not so easy because  my Quicken categories were inconsistent.   
Blame that on me.  Security price data did not transfer.  I spent 
several hours cleaning things up and still have some transactions I can 
not figure out, because of my sloppy use of categories.  I wouldn't have 
been able to figure out in Quicken either;  it was just more forgiving 
of my sloppy work.

I started with XML and am now using SQLite.  They both seem to work 
fine.  I leave gnucash running most of the time, to minimize the delay 
starting up loading my rather large data file.  I ran gnucash and 
Quicken in parallel for a while to get used to gnucash.  I'm sure the 
latter gives a more rigorous accounting of my activities.

Gnucash works well, and you can get answers through this group very 
quickly.  Mike

On 12/08/2015 01:49 AM, Plutocrat wrote:
> Joseph Hesse wrote on Monday, 07 December, 2015 08:42 PM:
>> I have about 15 years of Quicken data, with lots of categories, that I would like to import into gnu-cash. Am I going to have trouble doing this.
> Probably! There's lots of information in previous posts in this forum, so you should probably search for Quicken / QIF and distil relevant info out of it. If you have 15 years' worth of data, then that's probably too much to input by hand. If importing turns into a nightmare, one commonly suggested strategy is to input one year of 'overlap' data by hand, run them in parallel and then carry on with Gnucash when all issues are resolved.
>
>> Also, I am experienced using and configuring MySQL. Should I use this rather than the xml file?
> I'd say start with XML, or the zipped xml which is more space efficient and easier to maintain / backup. I think mysql only starts being advantageous if
>
> a) you have really big datafiles (eg 10Mb plus), in which case you might find mysql faster, and
> b) If you want to do clever custom reports with MySQL queries.
>
> You can easily switch over at any point.
>
> P.
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