Importing 401k mutual fund purchases

[Benjamin Kraus]

OK, a little more research and it looks like QIF cannot handle currency
exchange.

https://qlc.intuit.com/questions/123674-how-do-i-import-multiple-currency-transactions

I'm currently look into OFX to see if that can handle currency exchange.

- Ben

On 10/24/2015 11:14 PM, Benjamin Kraus wrote:
> 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 kraus.info

-- 
Benjamin Kraus
ben at benkraus.com
http://www.benkraus.com