Importing QIF files with multiple accounts w/o going through a transfer account

[RianMonnahan]

Dear All,

First, many thanks to those who replied to my request for help. The comment
that "I may be trying to use import to do something it was not intended for"
put me on the right track.

I was indeed trying to use the QIF and CSV import facilities to load
transactions from a legacy system's general journal. And I have succeed by
tricking the system. I'll explain later. 

GnuCash import appears to be geared to loading, say, a transaction summary
from your bank. The QIF/CSV important wants you to import into one account,
usually the bank. It will then happily distribute the balance of the bank
statement to various other accounts - suppliers, clients, expense, income,
etc. BUT all of these accounts "tranfer" account will be the bank.

The way to trick GnuCash into importing a general ledger is to set up a
dummy account, say, 9:91 called interface and to use that as the
base/transfer account for anything you throw at it. When important has
completed all of you BS accounts from the legacy system will be Dr/Cr
accordingly and the dummy account will have a zero balance.

Here's a contrived example:

File:
1 T1 Client A    100DR  BAL100DR
2 T1 Revenue 100CR  BAL100CR
3 T2 Bank      100DR  BAL100DR
4 T4 Client A  100CR  BAL0

Dummy after GnuCash import (mirrors the file):
1 T1 Client    100CR BAL100CR
2 T1 Revenue 100DR BAL0
3 T2 Bank     100CR BAL100CR
4 T2 Client    100DR BAL0

Accounts...

Client

1 T1 Dummy   100DR BAL100DR
4 T2 Dummy   100CR BAL0

Revenue

2 T1 Dummy   100CR BAL100CR

Bank

3 T2 Dummy 100DR BAL100DR


Again, thanks for your help everyone and I hope this post will be helpful
for anyone wanting to do the same thing.


















--
View this message in context: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/Importing-QIF-files-with-multiple-accounts-w-o-going-through-a-transfer-account-tp4690449p4690497.html
Sent from the GnuCash - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.