[GNC] Changing account tree on large database

[Tommy Trussell]

On Fri, Apr 26, 2019 at 9:13 PM Cricket Onebit <cricketbeautiful at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Somewhere I saw that most people find QIF works better, and that QIF is
> similar to CSV. If my version of Quicken won't export to QIF, I'll try CSV.
> There are too many variations of CSV for me to trust it entirely.
>

The QIF import USED to be the only way to accurately get "both sides" of
every transaction. The ability to get every part of a transaction in a CSV
is a new feature with the 3.x series. I haven't tried it.

You WILL almost certainly see some strangeness in the imported data because
Quicken doesn't strictly enforce balanced transactions as GnuCash does.
When you're just dealing with a few years, you may find it easy to go back
and fix the odd strange transactions in Quicken, and start the import over
from scratch.


> I might make one huge QIF, import it and save as GC, then make another QIF
> just of recent transactions for actual use.


That's my recommendation.


> That's a lot of work, though. I
> asked a few days about chunking it by date. They suggested doing each
> account separately. If I understand correctly, transfers between accounts
> might show up as two transactions otherwise. I guess Quicken exports the
> transaction twice, once in each direction. GC's matcher only checks against
> transactions it's already saved.
>

I might be wrong, but I believe the advantage of the QIF import is that
Quicken and GnuCash are pretty good about conveying the matching parts of
the transaction. I don't remember it being a problem at all, once you got
over the process of creating all the accounts (on the GnuCash side).

It seems like I started with the default GnuCash accounts, and worked from
a printout of my Quicken accounts and categories, and created them in
GnuCash beforehand. That made the transfer happen much faster because I
wasn't creating new accounts as I went along.

You might also try exporting just however many years of data from a single
bank account at a time until you have them all. Unless I'm mis-remembering,
I think the only places you'll have duplicate transactions will be those
places where you transferred money BETWEEN the bank accounts.

Good luck!


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