Importing prior transactions

[Rich Shepard]

On Wed, 18 Jan 2017, John Morris wrote:

>  I was in the same boat about a year ago, switching from twenty years' use
> of Quicken to GnuCash. It is certainly possible to import old transactions
> via qif.

John,

   That's what I thought; confirmation is always a Good Thing.

> However, I'll give you two caveats: First, I found that GnuCash bogs down
> with too much data. Because I did not want to have to go back to Quicken
> to look at the old data, I imported everything, tolerating the sluggish
> performance while I did this, and then split the file in two (everything
> before 2010 and everything after 2010). That reduced the file to a
> manageable size while still giving me the option of reviewing some of the
> old transactions.

   I switched banks in 2010 and don't care about anything prior to that as
it's beyond requirements for data storage. My accountant tells me that 4
years is sufficient backup in case of an audit, but I keep 7 years of data.

   What I'll do is export each year separately to reduce file sizes.

> ... but I do recall that I had to remove all non-ASCII characters from the 
> qif file.

   This is a non-issue for me as all my data are in ASCII. That's the
linux/*BSD standard. Whenever I get a text file from someone running Windows
the first thing I do is convert line endings with the dos2unix filter.

Thanks,

Rich