[GNC] CVS import success/issues

[Lisa Rowell]

Thanks for the congratulations, it was probably the longest run once 
program I've ever written and there was a LOT of time spent cleaning 
things up.

Thanks for the confirmation that Capital Gains method works, that was 
the section I was referring to. I played with it more and realized what 
was going on. I had left the Trial Balance report up all during my 
experimentation, and only played with the General tab, not noticing the 
Accounts tab. When you first bring up a report it defaults to all 
accounts, but if leave it up and add a new account, for example a 
Capital Gains:XXXXX account, you have to go to the accounts tab and 
explicitly add it to the set, otherwise it's not included in the next 
refresh and it looks like the added gain/loss isn't recognized. Sigh. I 
should have figured that out much sooner than I did.

I also played with the lots mechanism and yeah it's definitely a handy 
tool, thanks for the pointer. I couldn't get the UI to let me select 
multiple splits to add at once, but it still seems to be the way to go. 
It should work for 99% of my sell transactions, and the remainder are 
ones involving transfers without sales, which I can handle on my own. 
I've had very few of those anyway (maybe 2 or 3). I tried the Scrub 
mechanism, but it seemed to alter transactions in my ledger and I'd 
rather not go that route.

Thanks.

Lisa

On 8/17/2021 12:55 AM, Geoff wrote:
> Hi Lisa
>
> Congratulations on pulling off such a massive data migration!
>
> To try and answer your question about the Trial Balance, yes I have 
> seen unresolved capital gains / losses causing this report to not 
> balance. When you mentioned "9.7.1.2" did you mean "9.7.1.2. Separate 
> the Capital Gain/Loss Transaction from the Sale Transaction." in the 
> "GnuCash Tutorial and Concepts Guide"?
>
> https://www.gnucash.org/viewdoc.phtml?rev=4&lang=C&doc=guide
>
> If so, yes, I record the capital gains / loss transactions separately 
> from the sell transactions and have not encountered any problems.  I 
> recommend the use of the Lots functionality - hard to grasp at first, 
> but once it clicks you are cooking with gas ;--)
>
> My Trial Balance is currently in balance, but it took quite some time 
> and effort (running it at different "As At" dates) to track down the 
> offending transactions.
>
> Good luck!
>
> Regards
>
> Geoff
> =====
>
> On 16/08/2021 9:42 am, Lisa Rowell wrote:
>> 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
>>
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