In the past I’ve tried and failed to get GnuCash to automatically download stock quotes. At the moment I have to type them in manually which is an excruciating chore. Unfortunately the documentation for how to do this for non-US funds is patchy and the only feedback you get is an unhelpful “computer says no” pop-up.

But today I finally got it to work! Hopefully these steps will save someone else this pain…

  1. Find out the fund’s ISIN code: this is normally on the fact sheet somewhere. It should be a long alphanumeric string starting with “GB” like “GB00BMHTPT71”.
  2. Open the securities editor for that fund. Paste the ISIN code into the box labelled “Symbol/abbreviation” not the one labelled “ISIN, CUSIP or other code”: that’s just there to confuse you.
  3. Select the “Get Online Quotes” checkbox and then the “Unknown” quote source. Then search through the enormous unsorted list in the drop-down for the “ftfunds” option. It should look something like this:
    editor
  4. Open the price editor and click “Get Quotes”
  5. ????
  6. PROFIT!

If that doesn’t work you could try the command line tool gnc-fq-dump. (That’s how I figured this stuff out in the first place.) For example:

$ gnc-fq-dump ftfunds GB0001036531
Finance::Quote fields Gnucash uses:
    symbol: GB0001036531         <=== required
      date: 01/02/2015           <=== required
  currency: GBP                  <=== required
      last: 2.268                <=\       
       nav: 2.268                <=== one of these
     price: 2.268                <=/        
  timezone:                      <=== optional