Importing 401k mutual fund purchases

[Benjamin Kraus]

I'm trying to figure out the best way to import mutual fund purchases
into GnuCash.

The purchases are part of my 401k plan managed by Charles Schwab
Retirement Services. Every two weeks part of my paycheck goes to Charles
Schwab (with a match from my company) to purchase shares in four
different mutual funds.

I record these purchases as two transactions: one for my 401k
contributions and one for my company match.

Each transaction has 5 splits:
1 for the cash leaving my Charles Schwab "cash" account, and
4 mutual fund purchase.
The mutual fund transactions include both the number of shares and the
cost of the shares (I let GnuCash automatically calculate the cost/share).

At the moment I enter these transactions manually into GnuCash, but I'd
like to find a way to make the process a little more automatic.

In an ideal world, I'd use "Quicken DirectConnect" to connect directly
from GnuCash to Charles Schwab. I emailed customer support and they
claim to support this, but the instructions they sent were specific to
Quicken and I have been unsuccessful in all my attempts to get it to
work with GnuCash. (I have it pulling transactions from my bank, just
not from Charles Schwab). From what I can tell, Charles Schwab's
"Retirement Services" are a completely different system from their other
services. When I try to use DirectConnect from GnuCash to Charles
Schwab, I get the exact same error message I get when I try to log into
the Charle's Schwab main site with my retirement services
username/password, which suggests I am using the wrong server name or
FID, but I have not been able to find the correct values, so at the
moment I've given up.

Even if I used DirectConnect, I suspect it would show up as five
different transactions: cash leaving the "cash" account, and four
different purchases. I'm not sure how GnuCash would handle "merging" them.

My fallback plan is to download CSV files from Charle's Schwab and then
write a script to parse the CSV files and spit out a QIF file that can
be imported directly into GnuCash. However, I've been looking around
online for an example QIF file that includes mutual fund purchases (aka,
split transactions that include five different types of "currency"). I
somehow need to include information about both the cost of the shares
and the number of shares for all four mutual funds, but I don't know how
to do that in QIF files.

I'm up for any other options, such as some other file format (OFX?).

Has anyone managed to get something similar working before?
Any recommendations for either getting DirectConnect working or what
file format is best for importing mutual fund purchases into GnuCash?
Would someone be able to send me a sample QIF (or other format) file
showing this type of transaction?

Thanks!

- Ben

-- 
Benjamin Kraus
ben at benkraus.com