Wow! I'm impressed and have a question

[Dustin Henning]

Sorry for the duplicate reply, but I forgot to copy the list...

Unfortunately, I won't be much help here because I imported from MS 
Money, where I did not use tags.  However, I have a couple guesses at 
what went wrong, which could potentially help you find a way to resolve 
the issue (maybe not an easy way, unfortunately).

FYI, I deleted the original e-mails, so I could be way off-base since I 
can't review everything.  I guess I shouldn't have trimmed the message I 
was replying to below down, but I thought it would be less confusing 
that way.

1)  Maybe the "split" wasn't a split in quicken and only one of the tags 
is imported.  If you associated that tag with your checking account, 
then the money would go from and to the checking account and you would 
see the negative and positive entry both in the checking. Unfortunately, 
it sounds like this is what you want, so I'm not sure how to fix it if 
that is the case.

2)  Maybe there are more than two entries associated to the checking 
account (do you see +300 and -300 in checking both twice for the same 
transaction? [this would look like 4 separate entries in the ledger]). 
In that case, you could click on any one of the transactions, choose the 
split view, and see they are all the same transaction.  Fixing it in the 
split view would then be fairly simple, but since you want to fix it in 
the import, I'd have to suggest trial and error.  Specifically, run the 
import again to a fresh file (because once you associate accounts, it is 
sometimes pretty tricky to disassociate them) and do not choose the same 
account twice under any circumstances.  Hopefully that will allow you 
too see what everything is.  At that point you can try to import again 
accordingly or delete the excess accounts.  When you delete an account, 
you will be prompted to move all transactions to another account, so you 
should be able to push all transactions to the correct accounts that way 
if your data entry and Quicken's data export were both consistent.

3)  [1] and [2] assumed your checking account balance was right.  If it 
is also wrong, the suggestion in [2] may still apply.  Regardless, I 
would recommend finding the transaction looking at it in the split view 
to determine exactly what components of the split still exist and where 
they went.

4) It may be possible that you hit cancel at a prompt for an account 
during the import at a prompt for account selection.  When I hit cancel 
on a prompt for an account during ofx/qfx imports to update/reconcile my 
file, those transactions are not shown in the transaction importer.  In 
such a case, maybe Quicken actually treats the multiple transactions as 
separate instead of a single split and you only imported half of it.  I 
suppose in this scenario the solution would still be my suggestion in 
[2] and the confirmation of what happened would still be what I 
suggested in [2] and [3].

That having been said, while it makes no difference to me, I thought you 
said QuickBooks earlier, and you definitely said Quicken in this e-mail. 
  They are definitely not the same thing, so depending on who is helping 
and how, it might be important that they know which one you were running.

On 1/9/2015 9:56 AM, Ron Nicol wrote:
 > Thanks to everyone who responded to my earlier message. I appreciate 
the feedback on how this transaction should be entered.  All of the 
advice is very good and would be exactly how I would enter the 
transaction manually. Unfortunately, I have numerous types of these 
transactions over the decades so I'm trying to determine how the QIF 
importer is handling these transactions to identify whether I'm doing 
something wrong and whether it's being properly handled by the software.
 >
 > Maybe a little more context will be helpful. The specific situation 
that arose leading to this type of transaction was when my daughter 
asked for a loan to buy a car. The transaction I entered into my Quicken 
check register was a $300 split entry to recognize her allowance and an 
opposite split to transfer that $300 to reduce the amount of the loan 
she owed me. This works in Quicken by leaving the checking account 
balance the same, decreasing the loan by $300, and increasing the 
Allowance Expense category by $300.
 >
 > After importing the qif file, gnucash does not show the correct 
balances. For example, the loan asset is not reduced in value. 
Unfortunately, as we all know Quicken is not a proper double entry 
system but I would think the importer should be able to properly import 
this transaction.
 >
 > Ron
 >
 >> On Jan 9, 2015, at 8:20 AM, Dustin Henning <The00Dustin at gmx.net> wrote:
 >>
 >>
 >>
 >>> On 1/9/2015 7:30 AM, Robert Kesterson wrote:
 >>>
 >>> 1.  Create the initial loan account and checking account.  That will
 >>> create transactions pulling money from "Equity:Opening Balances" into
 >>> the accounts, so that the double entry requirement is satisfied.
 >>>
 >>> 2.  Create an asset account called Allowance. This is where you 
want the
 >>> money to come from when paying the loan.  Set the opening balance 
to zero.
 >>>
 >>> 3.  Create a transaction in the checking account for $300, with the
 >>> destination account being the Assets:Allowance account.
 >>>
 >>> 4.  Create a second transaction in the Assets:Allowance account for 
$300
 >>> with the destination account being the loan account.
 >>
 >> For the record, you can actually do the same thing with a split. 
The split just needs to have for legs, with $300 on both sides of the 
two legs to the same Assets:Allowance account. This will look the same 
in the ledgers, but I don't know about reports.  Also, it might not be 
preferred since one could potentially argue that Assets:Allowance 
started with $0, then transferred $300 to itself, leaving it with $0 
while the $300 from checking still went straight to the loan account. 
Regardless of whether any of that matters, I mention this simply because 
it would make input easier if those potential negative side-effects 
(report problems and stupid arguments) don't apply.
 >>
 >> Additionally, while I don't know if this would be correct based on 
standard accounting conventions, another option here might be to make 
two sub accounts under Assets:Allowance.  For instance 
Assets:Allowance:In and Assets:Allowance:Out.  Then you could take $300 
from checking to Assets:Allowance:In and $300 from Assets:Allowance:Out 
to the loan.  These subaccounts would have balances that cancel each 
other out, making Assets:Allowance still show $0, and you could then 
report off of the relevant subaccount in order to see the dollar value 
of only transfers you want to see.  In this scenario, my previous 
discussion about splits would probably still apply in the same way.
 >>
 >


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 4256 bytes
Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
URL: <http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/attachments/20150109/115cde92/attachment-0001.p7s>