[GNC] Oddities importing from Quicken

[Simon Roberts]

Many thanks Murugan, Fred; I've been using GNC for some years now for other
accounting, so double entry is decently familiar (though I don't usually
use the transaction journal). However, I hadn't recognized what was
happening with the two entries, not least because each showed a split to
the other account anyway. But your observation makes perfect sense. Why the
QIF import didn't recognize that the source / destination accounts were
different--it seems to have duplicated the transaction in *both*
accounts--is puzzling, but I guess this kind of import is not a priority.

Particular thanks to Kalpesh, that's definitely not what I'd hoped for!
Anyway, at least it gives me a route to try. As one with a programming
background I can kinda see how the matching of an account for a transfer
could flunk out if that account doesn't exist yet. I will try the stepwise
approach you suggest. It almost makes it surprising that any of it worked,
after all, the software doesn't know the difference between a bank-type
account and a category, and the vast majority of the import worked in this
respect.

I suppose the bottom line is that if this can't be persuaded to work
smoothly there's no way I'm putting the time into fixing years of data with
seemingly arbitrary errors, so I'll have to decide between continuing to
run Quicken (not too big of a deal) along with windows (which is what I
really wanted to get away from!) or having a new set of accounts starting
from now and risking losing access to the historical stuff (which was what
happened when I quit paying Intuit for their ever more expensive stuff).

Thanks all, I guess I have a plan and fallbacks mapped out.

Cheers,
Simon


On Tue, Nov 19, 2024 at 4:39 PM Simon Roberts <
simon at dancingcloudservices.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm hoping to get my personal accounts onto GNC (I'm using it for a small
> business, so I'm tolerably familiar with it already).
>
> I exported a QIF from Quicken, and imported it. Lots of accounts were
> created in GNC that map "well-at-first-glance" to the actual accounts and
> categories in Quicken. However, many balances are way off.
>
> I've done some digging, and the thing I've noticed so far is that some
> transfers between actual bank accounts appear to have been entered twice. I
> say "appear" because I get oddly different results in "basic ledger" view
> from what I get in transaction journal view (though I must say up front,
> I'm not a transaction journal view user, so perhaps I just don't understand
> it.
>
> Here's one of the offending entries in basic ledger. There's only one
> entry (a deposit to this account) in the Quicken file. but notice two
> entries here--the blocked out account numbers are identical in the upper
> and lower entry:
> [image: image.png]
> Here's the transaction journal view, notice there's only one entry here (I
> left the previous and next visible so you can see that :) Again, all those
> greyed out account numbers are identical:
> [image: image.png]
> Did I do something wrong in the export, or in the import?
> I'd prefer to get this right from the start, there are quite a few years
> of data, and fixing this up by hand over all the accounts would be a
> frustratingly major undertaking.
>
> Any suggestions gratefully received,
> Cheers,
> Simon
>
> --
> Simon Roberts
> 303 249 3613
> https://www.youtube.com/@DancingCloudServices
> https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonhgroberts/
>
>

-- 
Simon Roberts
303 249 3613
https://www.youtube.com/@DancingCloudServices
https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonhgroberts/
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