[GNC] QuickBooks to GnuCash Migration Script improvements

[Brad Morrison]

Hi Vivek/all,

That LWN 'Escape from QuickBooks (with data in hand)' article 
(https://lwn.net/Articles/729087/) was great - thanks for sharing! I 
don't know if Jonathan Corbet (or Erik Mack) is on this mailing list, 
but Jonathan is a very clear and helpful technical writer. However, it 
was still difficult for me to read:

Partly it is pretty technical and over my head (I would have to look up 
what 'Python bindings' actually are in order to understand parts of the 
information that was being conveyed, just to give anyone a sense of the 
knowledge base that I am coming from).

Partly it is from August 2017 and I'm not sure how accurate it still is 
- I thought that GnuCash was now using Python 3 and not Python 2 as the 
LWN article states...? There are also points made about piecash and 
relational databases that I do not know if how that article portrays it 
from August 2017 is still current/accurate...?

Partly the whole nature of the article is depressing and disappointing 
in conveying how much work is required to migrate data from the 
proprietary data format that Quickbooks uses into a format that GnuCash 
(or any other free accounting system) can use. I have disliked Intuit 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuit) for a long time, but mostly from 
a financial perspective as Intuit is a publicly traded company with a 
market capitalization of about $120 billion USD 
(https://www.google.com/finance/quote/INTU:NASDAQ?window=MAX), yet 
Intuit is not even listed as one of the 287 largest contributors on the 
Open Source Contributors Index (https://opensourceindex.io/). Obviously, 
there has been a lot of effort put into maintaining Intuit's/Quickbooks' 
control of its market share from competitive threats like GnuCash or the 
US IRS' efforts to develop its own open source/free tax preparation 
software 
(https://www.propublica.org/article/congress-is-about-to-ban-the-government-from-offering-free-online-tax-filing-thank-turbotax). 


With how difficult it seems to be to export data out of Quickbooks, I 
can understand why there do not appear to be any professional 
bookkeepers in the United States that work with GnuCash, even just as an 
option (based on the lack of response to Bob Treumann's ask on this list 
on March 1, 2023). I don't know how many GnuCash users there are that 
started with QB and were able to successfully migrate their data to 
GnuCash (?), but after trying to read that LWN article, I'm guessing 
that most GnuCash users either migrated their data 'manually' or just 
started fresh with GnuCash...? Ouch!

Still it is super helpful to even understand the issues involved more 
fully - thanks again!

Brad


On 3/22/23 08:05, Vivek Gani wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I recently made some improvements to the migrations scripts that might help
> those trying to migrate from Quickbooks to GnuCash:
> https://github.com/erikmack/qb-escape
>
>
> Even if you're not using GnuCash the instructions for Quickbooks data
> export might be helpful if you're trying to have a backup of data in a way
> that's more accessible (i.e. for use in Excel, Libreoffice, etc.)
>
>
> If anyone has time available, I think a possible improvement would be to
> find a way to make a packaged 'download and run' migration tool so
> non-technical folks can have an easier path for migrating data to gnucash
> without trying to install gnucash with python bindings, etc.. This might be
> possible with pyinstaller though the complicated part will likely be trying
> to also bundle a gnucash with python bindings setup within there too, and
> for each different operating system.
>
> Linkbacks - these scripts were based on the LWN article 'Escape from
> Quickbooks (with data in hand)' -https://lwn.net/Articles/729087/
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