[GNC] CVS import success/issues

[Lisa Rowell]

In preparation for a move from Mac to Linux, I went to move from my 
circa 2015 version of Quicken for Mac to GnuCash. Sadly that version 
lacks QIF support and couldn't even be imported correctly into the 
latest PC Quicken. It does, however, have the option to view all 
transactions in one list and export the current list to a CSV file with 
Quicken-isms describing the transactions. Long story story: I was able 
to write a program to translate 99% of my 24 years of transactions into 
a format digestible by GnuCash's CSV import. The remainder, mostly 
Split, Add and Remove shares, were best dealt with by hand anyway. Along 
the way I ran into a few issues that might not have been reported. 
There's a question at the end.

1) Large files will blow up the program a crash that gives no clue of 
the issue on MacOS. On a PC it gives a popup with a cryptic message that 
I think amounts to a too many threads error. I got around this by 
outputting to per year files for most years and smaller for a few select 
ones. The crash would normally happen at the point of selecting the 
import configuration.

2) Multiple back to back imports will also crash the program. I got 
around this by exiting and restarting between imports.

3) The Num field, which I translated, for better or worse, from 
Quicken's similar field, had an issue where entries which did not have a 
Num entry would be given one. My limited experimentation with this 
seemed to indicate that when a split with no Num followed an entry on 
the same date that had a Num, it would inherit the previous entries Num.

4) The match algorithm is a bit too greedy in pairing splits. If you 
have a sequence of splits that describe two transactions that have the 
same date and description, they will be merged into a single 
transaction. This often came up with transactions like end of the month 
dividends or interest payments. If the algorithm encountered two splits 
that balance out in amounts, followed by two more that also balanced 
themselves, would not it be better to make them two separate 
transactions? This can be gotten around by artificially altering the 
transaction's description or by tedious manual editing.

5) When pulling in a lot of transactions at once, it seems that random 
entries get deselected in the match list. I wasn't able to predict the 
behavior though.

6) I wasn't able to get the Cleared field to work. If it was anything 
but "n" the split would be ignored. I'm not sure what the intention was 
on this, but it might be worth documenting.


And now for the question: I'm using version 4.5 and was not able to get 
the Trail Balance Report to show equal totals after a security Sell 
transaction, despite making Capital Gain/Loss entries. Is the technique 
described in 9.7.1.2 still supported? I tried the example in 9.7.2.1 and 
it gave me with an imbalance, but did it in my existing file. If it's 
supported I'll make a clean file and experiment with it more.


Thanks.

Lisa