Sunday, September 04, 2011

Importing ICICI Bank and other Banks account file in GnuCash

Update: This is four years old. A new post on same topic may be found here.

I wrote in the previous post that I would write about how to import Indian Banks Transaction files in GnuCash accounting software.

ICICI Bank offers download of Bank Transactions file in MS Money Format (.qif) and GnuCash accepts importing this file format but when you try to import it may fail and if it succeeds the import wizard will ask many questions. Open Office has a macro CALC2QIF which imports .qif file. When you import the file you will see that the Category column has entries like TCI, TBI, TIP etc and while GnuCash can import the transactions into the Bank Account it does not understand where to post the corresponding debit/credit entry into the other account. Let us consider one example.

Suppose you have received payment from your Customer there are two entries to be made. One in the Bank Account and the other in Accounts Receivable but the file downloaded from ICICI Bank shows TBI on the Category. You need to change TBI to Accounts Receivables. Similarly you should write the names of other accounts like Cash etc in the Category column. If you can't decide the account name you can write Imbalance against such entries in the Category and GnuCash will show them as imbalance till you change them.

After you change the entries in Category column you should select the cells and click on Save to QIF, clear the default fields and select them again in the order they are displaced i.e. Date, Amount, Check Number, Payee, Memo, Category and Sub-Category, select the destination for QIF output file and click on Convert.

Now you can import this file easily in GnuCash.

Air India direct flight to San Fransisco has flown through China today.

 My sister in law left for San Fransisco by AI 173 flight which flows over North Pole. I tracked that flight on flightstats.com till it land...