[GNC] Setting up existing investments in new GnuCash file

[Dean Bradley]

Thanks for the suggestions. It sounds from your description as though you entered a bunch of historical information for your investment accounts. Is this correct? To be clear, I have no intention of doing that. I am not bringing any history over from Quicken, for any account. I intend to use recent balances on each account as an opening balance in GnucCash, and then use QFX downloads to maintain them from that point. This applies to my investment account as well. It is an IRA, so I don´t need to identify lots, I have no splits, etc., I intend to start with positions as of X date, and import from that point on. If this is a bad approach, please let me know. But spending the time to bring over 3.5 years of history, since the establishment of the IRA, is a non-starter for me. 

~dean~

> On November 9, 2019 at 8:33 AM ornd25 at tutanota.com wrote:
> 
> 
> "Thanks for your reply. I get the impression that even if I get the import process sorted out, that this will be a tedious process and probably no easier in the long run that just entering all the data manually. You state the importer is ahead of the documentation, but my evaluation was based on actually trying the importer more than going following the documentation. None of them seemed suitable without a lot of work, and manual entry is a lot of work. I believe I'll do the latter. 
> 
> Regards, 
> ~dean~"I went through much the same process in August and was unable to use the importer for investments 
> effectively - I ended up doing much of it manually, also.
> 
> I have some techniques suggestions that might be useful for manual entry.
> "Save as" your work product as something like "GnuCash_Experimental" in a directory different from your main one in case of non-recoverable errors.
> Do one account at a time 
> Have your working account at the top level, e.g., ABCDE Mutual Fund, rather than "Assets:Investments:Taxable:Joint:Mutual Funds; this makes the splits easier to assign. Moving a whole account to its nested position later is easy using the (hair-raising) "Delete Account" technique, which I practiced a few times before invoking it with real data.
> Do only six months or a year's worth of your most recent data at a time. This gives you current information immediately, allowing you to fill in older data as you have time.
> Use common Description terms, such as "Dividend Reinvestment" when possible - this allows you to <Tab> to create the same split as previously, saving much Debit/Credit assignment clicks.
> 
> 
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