En masse creation of accounts?

[David T.]

Andrew,

I’ve been using GnuCash for about 11 years, and as far as I know, there is nothing like that. Please note that my comments below reflect those of another user, and not one of the developers.

When I first started setting up my own accounts, I hoped to have something similar (a tool that creates the investment account, any income or gains accounts, and adds the security into the security db), but the devil is in the details. How I structure my accounts and track my information will likely vary from yours; to create a generic tool to do this would entail a great deal of overhead. I ultimately abandoned the idea as more trouble than it was worth. I have further decided that my time spent figuring out how to set up these accounts gave me far more understanding of the effect that my choices have on creating useful information. So, I personally recommend biting the bullet and inputting the information by hand. Keep in mind that if you don’t like your account structure, it is easy to move accounts around by editing the account information. I’ve done that numerous times over the years.

As to your specific questions about importing account info, I’ll start by saying that I believe (although I am sure someone will correct me when I am wrong) that OFX files are by definition single accounts, so theoretically, it would be invalid to use OFX to import multiple accounts that way.

As for csv, there is an “Import Accounts from csv” option in GnuCash, which in my initial testing indicates that you can import account information into GnuCash, although I was unable to entice GnuCash into actually importing an account. It appears that the importer is a) quite particular about what it expects to find, and b) is not all that verbal in explaining why my test data failed to import. In regards to (a), I discovered that you must include exactly the same number of elements on each line as the importer expects, and not end the line with a comma. In regards to (b), my quick test import failed with an error that “Row 2, account bob not in MyAccount”, which means next to nothing to me, since the two fields in question are named in the importer as “full_name” and “name”. For reference, here are the headings included in the importer dialog, with my comments. Note that every assertion here is tentative because I have been unable to get any accounts to import. Perhaps a developer can fill in some of the information about what each of these columns is supposed to contain.

type - one of GC’s account types
full_name - apparently some combination of account names, although what is not clear
name - same issue as with full_name—but how specifically does it relate to full_name
code - the account code number you might assign
description - the account description
color - perhaps the color to display in the COA, although what format this entry should take is not clear—presumably html hex codes, but who knows?
notes - account notes
commoditym - this is an important element for how the account value is calculated; however, I have no idea what is supposed to go here, as it refers to the inner structures and functions of GC and how it actually stores your split amounts (as two integers that are divided to create the real value—you probably don’t know that)—information that I do not know, but which I believe relates to the “Smallest fraction” entry on the account definition. That, however, doesn’t explain what this field should contain.
commodityn - same as commoditym
hidden, tax, placeholder - boolean flags controlling these aspects of an account

HTH,
David

> On Jan 15, 2017, at 10:41 AM, Andrew Gross <biz.aeg at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Greetings,
> 
> Is it possible to create en masse investment accounts by importing from a
> CSV (or similar file) or OFX download from a financial institution?  By
> create, I mean GC would read the file and initialize the investment (as
> opposed to manually doing so via the Security Editor), and would initialize
> the accounts in which the securities are held?  If this is feasible for GC,
> is there documentation on this (I have already referred to the Help and
> Tutorial guides) or is it best to setup a test GC file and experiment?
> 
> Kind regards,
> Andrew Gross
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