Importing QIF files

[David Carlson]

On 2/3/2015 12:28 PM, David T. wrote:
> Mark,
>
> For what it's worth, GnuCash is fully capable of importing large and
> complex QIF files. I know, because that is how I migrated from
> Quicken--back in 2005. I had a full array of account types, except
> perhaps a mortgage, and my import was able to create not only my bank
> accounts, but also all of my categories as Expense accounts. I do
> recall doing the import multiple times, until I got the result I was
> after.
>
> I believe it is in your best interest to figure out what is causing
> the import to break, because when it works, the result is much less
> work than the alternatives. 
>
> I will note that your original messages included error messages that said:
>
> Investment action: Unrecognised action ''.
> Transaction amount: Unrecognised or inconsistent format.
> Did you verify that your investment transaction entries all had
> appropriate, non-null "N" entries, and that the transactions have
> correct formatting for the "T" entries? 
>
> You might be able to track down the first problem by searching the QIF
> file for lonely N's--i.e., {CRLF}N{CRLF} (where {CRLF} is your OS's
> line break).
>
> With regard to the second error, past users have discovered that
> currency symbols will cause transaction format errors. I believe I
> have also heard that amounts using commas and periods differently than
> the importer expects can cause problems. 
>
> David
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* Mark Wigmore <mawigmore at gmail.com>
> *To:* David Carlson <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com>
> *Cc:* "gnucash-user at gnucash.org" <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
> *Sent:* Tuesday, February 3, 2015 10:02 AM
> *Subject:* Re: Importing QIF files
>
> On 3 February 2015 at 16:36, David Carlson
> <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com <mailto:david.carlson.417 at gmail.com>>
> wrote:
>
> > While your QIF file is full of sensitive data that would be tedious to
> > sanitize, I think that it should be possible to take a tiny excerpt
> > representing a couple of transactions in one  or two accounts and
> > sanitize that just to show the structure.  If you have not yet resolved
> > the date representation issue, for example, this could be helpful.
> >
>
> I didn't have a date issue, never got that far! It would be helpful, as I
> said before, if the error reports gave some indication of what was causing
> the problem, even a file offset or better still the full text of the
> transaction it was struggling with.
>
>
> > Change the name of a bank account to something trivial like fooBank, for
> > example.
> >
> > I recall that when I went through that process a few years ago I needed
> > to not only create QIF exports from Moneydance for fairly short time
> > windows like a month or two at a time,  but I also needed to manually
> > remove certain sections for the investment accounts from the middle of
> > the QIF before importing it into GnuCash.
> >
> >
> I've had a thought, not sure if it will work. I could export each account
> separately from BankTree and import them individually into GnuCash. Not
> sure how it would be able to link up the two sides of the double entries
> though.
>
>
>
>
> Mark
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Wow.  GnuCash QIF import will import investment transactions if the
actions like Buy and Sell are properly identified.  I wish I knew that
long ago.

David C