Importing 2 qif files creates 4 accounts

Asked by David van Harn

I am a retired American expat who lives in Panama with only my U.S. government Social Security pension as income. I have no investments or property to manage, only a US bank account, cash, and now a new Panama bank account.

After doing some research this morning, I migrated my accounting data from AceMoney to the HomeBank on Windows 10. AceMoney supports only two accounts in the free version, so now that I have a Panama bank account in addition to one in the U.S., I needed to switch to another accounting app that will support at least three accounts.

AceMoney exports each account to a discrete QIF file, so I ended up with two files - Cash and Bank. When I import just the Bank account into HomeBank "Bank", It creates a second account. That second account is apparently a subset of the AceMoney "Cash" account that includes only "internal transfers" between "Cash" and "Bank" ). Next, when I import the Cash QIF, if apparently does the same thing, and I end up with four accounts - one each for Bank and Cash, and two additional unnamed accounts that likely contain only the "internal transfer" transactions between the two accounts because they were "imported" separately.

So I classified and renamed those two spurious accounts, and then marked them as closed. The result is that in HomeBank, I see only my three working accounts visible - with accurate balances. (I manually created a new account for my new Panama banking which has only two transactions so far. )

Question: Should I take on the very tedious task of editing two years worth Bank-to-Cash to transfer them to transactions in the real-world accounts and then delete those accounts? Or should I simply leave them - and perhaps start from scratch on January 1 by creating a new file where I simply set up three accounts, manually enter end-of-year balances, and create new categories as I go, (I would archive the old data files with the awkward and confusing duplicate accounts)

After reviewing this message, I think I already know the answer - start anew on January one. But it would still be interesting to know whether there is actually a way to import two discrete QIF account files and end up with two in HomeBank rather than four - two for each actual account.

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Maxime DOYEN (mdoyen) said :
#1

the QIF format define C line with [stuff] as a transfer from account A to stuff
this is normal
you cannot disable import it
but you are free to delete it after

If you matter of old txn try to minimise the time by import and maybe delete
in fact do as you want, I can't really advise on this

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