Hi all,
For anybody who may be interested in this issue, or who may have similar
concerns with truncated Memo fields in their own exported Quicken QIF
files, I wanted to provide an update here. While the ideal solution
might be to locate and patch each and every truncated Memo field in the
QIF file, the scripting involved in doing that is just too overwhelming
a task -- at least for me it is. I'm also concerned about making a
mistake or missing something in the process of attempting that. So I
came up with an alternate solution that I think works pretty well.
Here's what I'm doing.
In Quicken, I'm going back and creating Transaction Reports for each of
my important checking and credit card accounts where I know that I
typically entered long detailed Memo fields. These are the accounts
where I'm seeing the most truncation in my QIF file. The fields that
I'm including in each Transaction Report are: Date, Num, Description,
Memo, Category, and Amount. I also have Show Splits checked. In
Quicken you can Export to PDF format using the built-in Quicken PDF
Printer. But in my case I print it to a third-party device: CutePDF
Writer. In either case, the result is the same: outputting each
Transaction Report to a PDF file.
For my heavily used checking account going back 14 years, the resulting
report is 135 pages in landscape mode; but it's also just 710 KB of disk
space. In most cases, I probably won't have much need to refer back to
this report; since all future transactions will be in GnuCash. But if I
ever do have a need to go back to see the full un-truncated Memo field
from one of those old transactions, I can just open up the PDF file, do
Ctrl-F (Find), type in the date; and I'm back at the original
transaction with the full Memo field.
I know my explanation here is long; but creating and saving those PDF
reports in Quicken is really simple. For me, it's the easiest way to
ensure I don't lose any info in transitioning from Quicken to GnuCash.
Tom
On 8/28/2025 3:13 PM, Sherlock wrote:
Hi Tom,
Your guess is correct. The script used the exported .txt file to
identify each transaction that would have truncated memos in the QIF,
then located the truncated transaction in the QIF file. To limit the
accounts you need to export, scan the QIF file to identify the accounts
with at least one memo value at the limit.
Unfortunately, I have not been locate the script. I'm not even sure it
was something I would have saved.
Regards,
Sherlock
On 8/27/25 11:38 PM, Tom Route-36 wrote:
Hi Sherlock,
I'm guessing that once you produced the Transaction Reports in Quicken
you then had to export each of them to Excel Compatible Format (i.e.
Tab Delimited Export Files .txt). I could probably do that, even
though it would take quite a while; since I'd have to do it account by
account (and there are 20+ years worth of them). And since I can't
really be sure which transactions have truncated memos, I'd pretty
much have to assume all of them have problems.
But where I'd really run into trouble is trying to figure out a script
to correct the truncated memos in the QIF files -- which I'd probably
also need to do account by account. Do you still have any such
example script files that I could study as a guide in how to setup
such scripts? I've never really tackled anything this complex before.
Tom
On 8/27/2025 10:53 PM, Sherlock wrote:
Hi Tom,
In September 2022, I successfully migrated our 25 year old Quicken
data file to GnuCash 4.12 on Windows 10. To work around Quicken's QIF
export memo truncation issue, I recall running queries in Quicken to
produce transaction report files with the impacted transactions and
then using a script to correct the truncated memos in the QIF file.
Regards,
Sherlock
On 8/27/25 8:46 PM, Tom Route-36 wrote:
Hi all,
This is more of a Quicken question than a GnuCash question; but I'm
wondering if anyone here has run into a similar issue with
transferring data from Quicken to GnuCash -- and (maybe) figured out
a way around it.
When I transfer transactions from Quicken 2016 into a QIF file for
importing into GnuCash, I'm finding that all the Quicken Memo fields
get truncated down to 30 characters regardless of how many
characters are actually in those Memo fields. For reference, note
that Quicken 2016 supports Memo fields up to 64 characters. And
GnuCash v5.12 supports Memo fields of well over 100 characters.
What I'm wondering or asking here is this. Has anyone else run into
this issue? And does anyone have a suggestion for how it might be
possible to export the full 64-character Memo fields from Quicken?
(FYI, we're talking over 20 years of Quicken data here.) Any help
or ideas would be appreciated.
Tom
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