[GNC] Slow migration

[Ken Farley]

I just did this for about 12 years of old Quicken data. I've had dozens 
of different accounts over the years, most of which are gone.

My technique was arrived at after trying a lot of different things, 
reading the Wiki, etc.

First, I had to get my hands on an old computer that I could use to 
install my Q 2011 (from CD, of all things).

I installed Quicken 2011 and plugged in a USB stick with all my old QDF 
files.

After trying a lot of things, getting a massive mess of nonsense, etc. I 
arrived at a method that worked really well for me.

I arbitrarily decided I'd tackle the data one year at a time.

I had Quicken spit out a QIF for the first year of interest, 2000, with 
a complete set of data from its beginnings (in 1990s) until 2000-12-31. 
I don't know about your previous software, but I found I had to 
*explicitly* dictate the program to give me all the data. I defaulted to 
just what it considered important, skipping stuff like securities and 
other important stuff.

I started a new Gnucash file, cancelling out of the account creation it 
starts with. I didn't want to set up any accounts, 'cause I learned it 
was easier to rename and reorganize the stuff pulled in from the QIF 
file than try to remember the admittedly unrefined organization I 
implemented 20 years ago.

I imported the 2000 and earlier QIF file, taking everything it had. For 
me, all the accounts except a few were brought into Gnucash as top 
level. This is good I thought, because I was then able to move things 
into the appropriate sub-accounts, like Assets, Expenses, and the like.

Now was the toughest part. Re-organizing. I created a "proper" structure 
of top-level accounts and sub-accounts, in line with what I do in my 
current Gnucash data files. I found it previous experimentation that it 
was best if I moved virtually all the accounts created by the QIF import 
into sub-accounts. For example, what came in as

"ABC Checking Account"

was now in

"Assets->Bank->Checking->ABC Checking Account"

Reorganizing let me take all the weird things Quicken does (it handles 
stock splits in a goofy way, for example) and implement them in the 
Gnucash fashion, which is really much more understandable. Quicken also 
seems to have allowed me to make stupid mistakes that I was hopefully 
able to correct during my review and reorganization.

Once I had that first years worth of stuff imported and fixed up, the 
next steps were easier.

Read the next year's worth of data in. I don't know what you intend to 
do, or currently do, but I keep my taxes, income, expenses in 
sub-accounts for each year. Bringing in each year's data (from, for 
example, 2001-01-01 to 2001-12-31) I could easily re-organize it into 
the proper sub-account structure. It's a lot of editing and checking, 
but hey, you've gotta have a hobby, right?

The two Gnucash program features that were amazingly helpful for this 
task were:

(1) Editing accounts and changing their parent. This makes re-organizing 
the structure incredibly easy.

(2) Being able to delete an account and move its transactions to another 
account. This was how I got all the transactions for the year's data I 
just read in to be included in the previous years' data. For example I 
can delete the "ABC Checking Account" from the most recent year's data 
and put all the transactions into the "Assets->Bank->Checking->ABC 
Checking Account" one.


So, it's a tedious process, but you can work through it pretty quickly 
once you get the knack. I'll say this, I'm amazed at how nice Gnucash is 
to do this kind of massive data manipulation. Quicken gave me a lot of 
"unspecified" stuff, probably my fault for entering it improperly, but 
Gnucash let me clean it up pretty easily. And the aforementioned account 
editing was a lifesaver.

Hopefully your previous software is available to let you export 
sufficient data for import into Gnucash. If you want to have all that 
historical data it is really nice. Plus, even with a file with hundreds 
and hundreds of accounts and a decade of data, Gnucash is incredibly 
fast to read it and let me navigate around. And I have all my old stuff 
at hand, instead of buried in data files I honestly couldn't read anymore.