Importing 401k mutual fund purchases

[David Carlson]

Ben,

I concur with David T.  Before my wife retired she had a similar
situation.  I created a typical bi-weekly transaction pair similar to his
proposal, and manually duplicated them, updating the actual shares each
time.  It was a pain, but it got the job done with few errors, and those
were my own keystroke errors.

While OFX can theoretically handle multi-account investment or banking
imports in a single file, I do not think that anyone has published a
conversion utility that would work with GnuCash.

David C



On Sat, Oct 24, 2015 at 11:04 PM, David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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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