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.
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