Importing Quicken data into GnuCash

Bill Gribble <grib@billgribble.com>

Table of Contents

Overview

Quicken is one of the best-selling programs in the history of the Universe. Pretty much everyone that has owned a PC or Mac since the late 80's has had a copy of it lying around somewhere, and lots of people actually use it to keep track of their finances. Why? Because it works pretty well and Intuit has (to their credit) done a good job of keeping up with what people want the program to do.

They've done such a good job, in fact, that lots of Linux folks keep a Windows partition on their machine just so they can run Quicken and the latest shoot-em-up games. So of course we want to give you a way to suck all your Quicken data into GnuCash and remove one more barrier to putting a nice ext2 filesystem on that Windows partition.

The problem is that GnuCash is a real double-entry accounting system and Quicken has a pretty simplistic view about what an account is, what a transaction is, and, most critically, is severely flawed in its datamodel, that is, what it saves in data files.

Briefly, QIF files just don't contain enough information to completely and accurately reconstruct your Quicken account hierarchy in the GnuCash double entry system without some educated guessing by the import code as well as some guidance, provided by you.