[GNC] CVS import success/issues

[Derek Atkins]

Yay! Glad you figured it out!
That account selection behavior hits lots of newbies.

-derek
Sent using my mobile device. Please excuse any typos.
On August 17, 2021 7:40:08 PM Lisa Rowell <lisa.gives.in at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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