Importing 401k mutual fund purchases

[David T.]

Ben,

I understand your troubles, but I cannot make any great suggestions, except to say that perhaps you might consider copying your transaction and editing the shares for each of the funds. GnuCash will automatically ask you if you want to recalculate the price when you tab out of the line. I find this not too burdensome, especially when the dollar amount stays consistent from transaction to transaction.

David

> On Oct 24, 2015, at 11:24 PM, Benjamin Kraus <ben at benkraus.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
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