[GNC] My experience importing 19 years of Quicken data into GnuCash

[no_more_quicken]

I've been diligently tracking my personal finances since early 2000. I
started with MS Money, then reluctantly switched to Quicken when Money was
discontinued. I LOVED MS Money, but I've never really been happy with
Quicken.  It's hard to pinpoint exaclty why, but some combination of the
clunky UI, subtle bugs in the reporting, upgrades with no new features, etc.
made me lose confidence in the program and made me want to switch. Over the
past 19 years, I've accumulated a large variety of accounts & transactions,
including trades of stocks/commodities/futures, hedge fund investments,
cryptocurrency trades, corporate pension accounts, restricted stock
distributions, IRA accounts, 401k accounts, 529 accounts, home purchases &
sells, auto loans, tax adjustments, cash accounts, etc.

I tried MANY alternatives, including the obvious online ones, but none of
the options supported all of my needs. None of the online solutions could
handle my manual cash accounts, nor maintain the full history from accounts
that have long been closed.  And none of the desktop programs supported all
of the different account/transaction types.

I recently stumbled upon GnuCash, and decided to give it an earnest chance,
partly because the double-entry backend + open source program gave me
confidence that my data would remain safe, exportable & future-proof once it
was converted.  I wrangled with the process for about a week, and finally
got all of my data in, but it was a bumpy road.  Here are some notes from
the process; I am hoping it will help others like me and/or the developers
looking to improve GnuCash.  This was all using GnuCash 3.4 (Build ID: 3.4+
(2018-12-30)) on a Surface Book 2 running Windows 10:

1.  At first, I exported everyting from Quicken into a giant 400k-line QIF
file, and tried to import that into GnuCash.  This took FOREVER (as in, 5+
hours), and eventually failed with an unhelpful message ("import failed", or
something similar). From the log file, I was able to see what appeared to be
the last successfully imported transaction, but no clue as to why the next
transaction didn't import.  Undeterred, I proceeded to export each account
individually from Quicken into ~50 separate QIF files, and imported them one
by one.  I'll note that each import took a VERY long time, which may or may
not be related to  the HiDPI bug
<http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GNC-Saving-in-GnuCash-painfully-slow-what-can-I-do-td4701583.html> 
, whose existence and workaround I only discovered after finishing the
import process.  During this arduous process, I experienced failures similar
to the giant import, and each time I had to manaully edit the QIF file to
remove offending transactions to make it work. In the end, there were 5
transactions that had to be removed, and they were all transfer transactions
which were duplicates of transactions which had been imported by an earlier
QIF file.

2.  The HiDPI bug mentioned above
(http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GNC-Saving-in-GnuCash-painfully-slow-what-can-I-do-td4701583.html)
nearly caused me to abandon GnuCash altogether, as saving to XML was taking
several minutes.  Before discovering the workaround, I tried using both the
mysql and sqlite3 backends, but not having a way to undo mistakes was a
dealbreaker.  (However, having the ability to export to SQL is amazing.) 
I'll also note that even after changing the HiPDPI scaling to be performed
by "System," the save to XML still takes ~25 seconds for me, which is still
quite slow.  I understand the root cause may be from a third-party library,
but I think somehow addressing this out-of-the-box would make a HUGE
difference to new users.

3.  Having gotten the data into GnuCash, next came the process of cleaning
things up.  Here, not having the ability to multi-select / bulk edit
transactions proved to be quite a handicap.  I found numerous situations in
which I wanted to re-categorize a bunch of stuff, clean up the way my loan
payments had been recorded in the past, etc.  I understand that the best way
would be to get it exactly right at the time of entry/import, but inevitably
people will make mistakes and want to correct them in bulk.  The "delete
account and move" workaround helped a bit, but still proved limited for what
I wanted to do.

4. The online banking setup is quite confusing, mostly because of the UI. 
Since most users (myself included) think in terms of their online
username/login, I think simply having a one-step Quicken-style wizard which
hides the UUID details could go a LONG way toward making things less
daunting. Once I figured out the terminology/UI, I had a relatively smooth
experience with some accounts (e.g., American Express), but for Chase I
ended up having to sniff my old Quicken network traffic to grab the UUID to
make it work, and for E*Trade I can get the account list but not download
any transactions.

5. I still haven't quite figured out the reporting framework; my goal is to
generate an "expenses over the last X months grouped by month" report (i.e.,
just like the "Expense Over Time" built-in chart, but in a table format with
all the numbers for every account).  I found  this thread
<http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/Monthly-Income-Expense-Reports-td1561239.html>  
from a decade ago but if anyone has any updated tips that would be
appreciated.

Now that I have my data imported and mostly cleaned up, I am hoping I won't
ever have to go back to Quicken.  A big thank you to all the GnuCash
developers for creating and maintaining a great program built on a solid
infrastructure.






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