Importing .csv into GnuCash

Question

Exported my Expenses Sub Account from GnuCash as .csv file and got the undermentioned 16 column headings.

1. Date
2. Account Name
3. Number
4. Description
5. Notes
6. Memo
7. Category
8. Type
9. Action
10. Reconcile
11. To With Sym
12. From With Sym
13. To Num.
14. From Num.
15. To Rate/Price
16. From Rate/Price

When I imported the same .csv, though I got all the above mentioned 16 columns, I have only the undermentioned 9 options as column headings.

1. None
2. Date
3. Num
4. Description
5. Notes
6. Account
7. Deposit
8. Withdrawal
9. Balance

On partially assigning fields such as Date, Description etc, during import I get the message There are problems with the import settings! The date format could be wrong or there are not enough columns set...

How do I resolve the issue?

Answer 1

I had same problem with GnuCash 2.6. The problem is GnuCash is not capable of importing its own exports.

Let's start with the bad news: in gnucash 2.6 and earlier gnucash is unfortunately not capable of importing its own export data.

The good news is this will be fixed in the next major release (2.8) currently tentatively planned for somewhere near the end of this year.

-- GnuCash mailing list 2017-03-27

So I upgraded to GnuCash 3.1 and it works; well under this conditions:

• you can't use your old exported CSV, you need to export them again (the format has changed)
• you may need to change character encoding of account tree CSV from UTF-8 to ANSI (if your account names contain special characters)
• export your CSV with
  • quotes
  • semicolon as separator
• you will probably need to manually match account names during import even though the names are the same (pain)

Don't skip the advices I learned them the hard way.