[GNC] Import from Quicken to GnuCash not Working

[Ken Farley]

A suggestion that comes up many times in the past and even in some of 
the responses you got is to break up the file and perhaps not try to 
import the whole thing in one go.

That being said, 14Mb is really not a very large file. The last time I 
did this kind of thing a couple of years ago I loaded about 20 years of 
data in a year at a time. The files were maybe 3Mb max each and imported 
in minutes, not hours.

I imported a year at a time, starting with the oldest. I found that 
Quicken had allowed me to make some bad transactions. Also, Quicken did 
some weird stuff to account for stock splits that don't concur with the 
method Gnucash uses. So I slogged through all the years by reading a 
year in, fixing all the messed up stuff, checking balances, saving. I'd 
copy the latest "good" file to a safe spot on my hard drive as I went 
along, in case a catastrophe occurred.

If you're getting the kind of failure you're seeing, my approach would 
be to split the file into two pieces. First half of years in one file, 
second half of years in another file. Try importing each half of the 
data. If one fails and not the other, split the failed one into two 
halves and try importing each of them, etc. You  should be able to zero 
in on the portion(s) of the QIF data that is "bad". You might have to 
look into the actual QIF data (it's just a text file) and see if there 
are any weird characters in there or something. 30 years of data 
probably modified by dozens of different versions of Quicken might have 
some strange entries like corrupted text fields and the like.

Once you find (and maybe fix) the bad QIF data, I'd suggest starting a 
fresh new Gnucash file and then import all the "good" QIF file(s) into 
that, oldest first.