Export & import within GnuCash

[Geert Janssens]

On Monday 30 March 2015 08:47:30 bunk3m wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> I've been reading the docs and making some tests but am unable to get
> my transactions out of GnuCash (2.6.5 Mac) and back into a clean
> account structure.  I am using the xml data format.
> 
> There was a short discussion in the mailing list in late 2014
> Export/Import Transactions where the person wanted to do the same
> thing but appears to have failed too.  There was no solution.
> 
> I have some problems with currency transactions that I have never been
> able to fix.  So I wanted to start with a clean balance sheet for the
> year (year end 2013).  I have many transactions that I don't want to
> try to manually recreate so I thought I could export from Jan. 1 2014
> to present and import those into a clean file.
> 
> I exported the account structure and created a new GnuCash file with
> that account structure.  So far so good.  I manually created the
> account balances so my balance sheet is correct.
> 
> Then I attempted to export the transactions from Jan. 1, 2014 to
> present from the old file and then import those transactions into the
> clean account structure.  This is where the problems started.
> 
> I am able to export, I think, but the import of csv fails.  I used the
> "|" (pipe) command as the separator initially but found the import
> won't allow "custom" separator.
> 
> So I tried to export with the comma separator as that looks to be the
> default.  I also selected "quotes".
> 
> It created a file that I then attempted to import.  However there are
> many more exported columns than available import columns so it looks
> like I will lose some info.
> 
> Understanding that I will likely have to fix some transactions, I
> tried to import what I had but that fails also.
> 
> Is it not possible to export and import transactions from GnuCash?
> 
Unfortunately it is not possible to directly import transactions that 
have been exported from gnucash. This is being addressed for gnucash 2.8 
(still a few years away). It won't be fixed in the 2.6.x series because 
the changes are too invasive.

So the best way forward is export the transactions, and do some manual 
tweaks to allow you to convert the exported csv file to qif. There are 
tools on the net that can help you with this. Qif is a much better 
supported file format for importing in gnucash.

Regards,

Geert