When I moved from a Windows desktop at home to Linux the only thing I missed was Quicken, or more specifically a personal accounting application that could handle Quicken files.
Before you rightly say that there are accounting packages that can import Quicken files I found that the ones I tried, HomeBank and GnuCash, created two accounts for each imported QIF file (I was using Quicken 6 so had to export each account to a separate QIF file). When you have a lot of accounts to import, including closed ones I was keeping for historic purposes, trying to fix this post-import is a nightmare so having seen this with more than one package I focused on the source files.
Even though Intuit came up with the Quicken Interchange Format (QIF) it seems that from reading up about QIF files their own software doesn’t fully follow the format, or at least Quicken 6 doesn’t! Checking the exported QIF files I saw that each was missing an !Account header section at the beginning of the file.
!Type:Bank
D7/28/18
T1,000.00
CX
POpening Balance
L[SMF Current Account]
^
By writing a little Perl script I was quickly able to add an appropriate !Account header section to each file and could then import all my accounts into HomeBank, my chosen application, without creating secondary accounts.
!Account
NSMF Current Account
TBank
^
!Type:Bank
D7/28/18
T1,000.00
CX
POpening Balance
L[SMF Current Account]
^
Whilst I’ve now happily been using HomeBank for some time I’m posting this in the hope that it helps someone else moving from Quicken.
Simon