[GNC] Having trouble trying to use Gnucash instead of Aplos

[Daniel Wieberdink]

Thanks Mike. It's just that the expense of the Aplos subscription is a
significant burden for our small church at the moment.
I'm also not a fan of the cloud-centric approach. I much prefer having
everything contained in one local file as Gnucash does
and having it run from my PC rather than a browser.

I just thought it would be nice to have the old data available. But I could
live with closing out the books and starting fresh as you describe. That's
kind of where I was going with trying to delete the mess of transactions I
had created without losing the account setup. I see
someone else has responded with how to export just the account setup. So
maybe I'll try that. Someone else said GC will not
handle records of individual donors/donations very well, so maybe this is a
dead end anyway. We definitely need to track donations and
generate year-end reports for every donor.

On Sun, Sep 15, 2019 at 10:34 AM Mike or Penny Novack <
stepbystepfarm at comcast.net> wrote:

> On 9/15/2019 9:15 AM, Daniel Wieberdink wrote:
> > I was hoping to transition to Gnucash to track finances for the small
> > church we belong to. I started by optimistically trying to import about 3
> > years worth of transactions from Aplos into GC via a CSV file. That
> didn't
> > go as smoothly as I hoped.
> Let me start by asking an important question. This "Aplos" application
> where you have the last three years data.Is something wrong with it? You
> will no longer have it available? << to view, to produce reports from,
> the existing data >>
>
> Because if THAT is the case, why are you trying to migrate this data to
> your new gnucash books?
>
> In the old days, pen and ink on paper in bound volumes, they used to go
> to "new" books all the time. Close the old books and open new books in
> fresh volumes on a regular basis << what else to do as physical books
> became full >>
>
> You can do the same sort of thing migrating to gnucash. You use your old
> application to produce a Balance Sheet as of the date of migration and
> use this to establish the opening balance of each of the "standing
> accounts". Then when and if you need to refer to old data (stuff before
> this date) you use the old application.  In my experience, such need to
> reference the old data is rare.
>
> That's what I have done every time I migrated an organization  to
> gnucash. I never tried migrating the old data. Perhaps if I had had to
> deal with some fixed assets, I might have handled those differently <<
> not just the balance remaining as of of the date of starting the gnucash
> books but the basis and depreciation history --- if you have to deal
> with those I will show you >>
>
> Michael D Novack
>
> PS: I do not ever use "opening balance" instead entering explicit
> opening the books transactions, one for debits and one for credits.
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