Exporting Account Totals in GNUCash

Question

I use GNUCash for personal finance and need to find a way to export the balances of all of my accounts in one CSV or any spreadsheet file. Exporting Account Tree doesn't work, and exporting transactions in a painstakingly long process to get the balances of all accounts.

I'm looking for something like the following:

Account    Balance
Savings    $144.32DR
Bank Loan  $50.00CR
etc.

The closest I got was being able to export the Trial Balance, however in HTML format this report is not useful.

The GNUCash 3.6 release notes have the following which could be of some use:

Allow CSV export of grand total amounts from reports using the trep-engine.

But I don't know how to export the information that I want

Answer 1

GnuCash has a reasonable range of reports but they are primarily designed to be displayed on-screen, exported to PDF or printed to paper. GnuCash is not great at exporting your data in a format designed for import into another application.

However, I can offer a couple of workarounds:

1. If you export your Trial Balance (or another report) as an HTML file, it is possible to import this HTML file into Excel. I did it using "Get Data - from Text/CSV" on the Excel "Data" ribbon, but there may be smarter ways to import it.

2. You can also do a direct copy/paste into Excel. Just run the screen report in GnuCash, use your mouse to select all the text, then paste into an empty Excel worksheet.

This system is not perfect. The formatting of the pasted/imported text may be different (probably worse) than it was in GnuCash. And using either import method, it's worthwhile checking that all the numbers ended up in the correct Excel column (the column totals at the bottom of my Trial Balance report were displaced one column to the left of where they should have been). Despite these shortfalls, you will be able to get GnuCash data into Excel with considerably less typing and less risk of error than through manually re-typing it all.

I didn't test the processes with other applications (only Excel) but I would imagine that you could achieve similar results.