Moving to MoneyDance From Quicken - Few Questions
Few open questions I have - It looks like a lot of my many many accounts are accommodated for here to download the transactions which is amazing. But I'm currently on Quicken, and would really like the double entry style of MoneyDance if that's indeed true.
1. Is this double entry accounting?
2. Is it at all possible to import legacy Quicken data for the sake of maintaining my current reporting? With no sacrifices? I have hundred+ accounts of closed/opened credit cards, bank account bonus' etc.
3. What is the overall upkeep? Is it overall a solid product or constantly innovating? Just wondering if I should buy the full software or do the monthly/yearly because a major upgrade could be around the corner.
4. What other advantages would you tell me that Moneydance has over Quicken from others that have made this journey and are now seeing things that they didn't have with Quicken?
Glad to see there is a community here, more than happy to bring my lifetime of transaction data to MoneyDance if it works out.
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1 Posted by dtd on 03 Aug, 2026 10:09 PM
1. yes
2. yes - reopen all accounts, use QIF and check ALL boxes to get as much as quicken will give you., (I moved 35+ years of data). This is NOT an 'export-import-done' because QIF is not a conversion format, but it's the best anyone has. There will be a massage process - especially with investments/securities. But there are many here who have done this - we can help make it easier - but it is multi-hours with investments (banks/credit cards usually are minutes - just set initial value)
3. This is overall a solid product, it's been around about 25 years. It innovates but a bit slowly right now. current version is 2024.4(5253), 2026 alpha is in process. I'd suggest full purchase, as it includes a free upgrade to next major version (in this case 2026) and future upgrades are 1/2 price.
4. Advantages - Let's reverse it - quicken is a big company, that brings advantages, but they don't seem to use them. Subscription only, support isn't well received etc.
MD is quite small, UK based, not 24/7, no phone support - right "here" is basically it. But we have a lot of "knowledgeable users" who enjoy helping out (like this answer).
MD does force you to properly account where everything goes (quicken will create and erase money if you ask it to - not double entry - and in fact one of the issues to deal with in moving over).
5. There is no five. MD+ is a subscription add on as direct connect is fading. I'd recommend a MD purchase and a MD+ sub ($40/year) if you want auto-downloads of everything. Use direct connect IF available.
If you have more than 35 years of data you'll be right up there in both data
(and age... ;) ) like some of us.
If it works out, welcome.
2 Posted by dtd on 03 Aug, 2026 10:12 PM
You can also download and use the demo to play. 100 manual transaction entry limit, but you do a full export/import to see the work level (balances will be wonky, but fixable) and you can set up downloads as well before payment,
3 Posted by David on 03 Aug, 2026 11:45 PM
@dtd - Thanks for the warm welcome
Couple remaining questions: With Quicken I was able to setup auto-reconcilations based on the downloaded transactions and always it grabbing the end balance and reconciling/clearing. Is that also possible here?
Andj when you mention MD+ - is that a reference to some of the things I see mentioned where they utilize Plaid as the back-end piece to connect with banks?
I'm only at about 10 years thus far as far as FULL data, but you can pry my 10 years of data from my cold-hands hehe. I originated off the old Mint days where it was all just....categorizing expenses.... Then I joined the big-boy accounting world (while working in it) and had a need to put in Paychecks for tax accruals, tax deductible vs. not, tax deferred vs. post-tax paid, etc. etc. Anything you can highlight on those topics would be great as well.
I also started my initial thing of getting it setup. Wowzers.... I have a ton of junk to correct with self-account transfers (That are now "X" accounts) that I didn't even realize I had.... Well, this will be fun....
4 Posted by dtd on 04 Aug, 2026 12:16 AM
yes, self-account transfers are definitely double entry no-nos. the X accounts are to create a place for that money to go to. I sort the original account, highlight all the X transfers and change the categor to something like Depreciation for Auto or whatever type of place the money should go to - you can also use find/replace extension - then you can delete that X account and move to the next one.
You can also do that in quicken then reexport - i did a lot of quicken changes to smooth out the export.
you can't do auto reconciliations as such, but you can reconcile and just mark everything, or you can highlight all new downloads and mark them cleared.
Moneydance+ is the plaid subscription.
you can highlight categories to be tax type categories and such, but it isn't a full tax program, as different countries have different tax rules and methods.
5 Posted by David on 04 Aug, 2026 10:35 PM
Alright, I'm going to need some severe help here. As I'm sure plenty have experienced in their fun world of this - originally when I had my initial investing accounts (401k through Employer) - I had very little knowledge at the time about accounting standards - or frankly - what I was doing when I started importing them into Quicken.
So both my 401k, and my wife's 401k are both a bunch of hodge podge of BoughtX, and SoldX transactions - since I wasn't using the paycheck/split feature to distribute out the cash from my paycheck like I am now. What is the best way to fix this? I have things like an account account that is worth ~$250k - coming across as negative -800,000 instead and I can't fathom how or what to even tackle on fixing this? I sincerely don't want to just write-off the build-up of the data just to put in current-day values....
Also what is the proper way to do a simple interest income for some kind of cash fund for an investment account? Div on the top, IntInc on the bottom?
I'm having some other problems that are more minor that I can begrudgingly fix - such as items that come as negatives that are positives, not putting the opening balance in place, etc. But whats killing me are the 401ks.
Any help here is appreciated because boy is it off-putting.
6 Posted by dtd on 04 Aug, 2026 11:27 PM
what simply killed me were my IRA's in quicken - at one point in time quicken locked iras into certain templates so they wouldn't properly move to anything else (like md). You've hit the "rabbit hole" as I call it. (you don't want to read my thread on conversion where dwg helped me, but now that the rabbit hole has appeared, i may get to help pay forward his help with you.) - it is/was called the 'vicissitudes of moving from quicken to moneydance" - but I'll work with you if you are willing to dive in. yours is harder than most, but i did it, and I'm very glad i did - i now have almost 40 years of clean data, and a great financial diary as well.
7 Posted by dtd on 04 Aug, 2026 11:32 PM
the first part is fixing the off-putting. Here is a post from that very long thread where i try to start by suggesting how to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
https://infinitekind.tenderapp.com/discussions/switching-from-another-personal-finance-program/15012-the-vicissitudes-of-quicken-to-moneydance/page/3#comment_48074651
8 Posted by dtd on 04 Aug, 2026 11:44 PM
so the above is "fudging" it, and if you want to make it cleaner (me definitely yes, others 'hey i have the data, i don't care about old balances' - thjis at least should give you the data, maybe even proper security ownership, and you put random values at the beginning of time for each account to make them correct today.
no ididn't want to do this at all, but after almost throwing the data out with thee dirty balances, i did it. boy did it feel good. i basically had what looked like my ledger.
for me there was still a LOT to do (the rabbit holes), but for many, they felt done. I just felt like there would someday be an ending.
9 Posted by dtd on 04 Aug, 2026 11:46 PM
moviing from quickens do anything you want i don't care to double entry accounting is daunting, but it feels good even after all the work - and given my fudgy short cut, you can always declare 'good enough' at some point.
10 Posted by dwg on 05 Aug, 2026 12:47 AM
How much work it is to move from Quicken depends on how clean and complete you want the data to be.
I'll give a couple of examples.
I wanted it to be a clean and as complete as I could get it, given the limitations I have in terms of the detail I can get data in, and what is, and is not reasonable. For example, I do have share purchases that date back to the 1980's that I still own, but I was not going to recreate the source accounts for the funds with complete history back to then, so I created a historic sink account to draw the funds from to facilitate recording the share purchases correctly, then marked it as inactive when I was done with it. I could have also achieved the same outcome with an initial balance amount in Moneydance, but I wanted it a little cleaner than that in the journal's running balance.
I have a number of investment wrap accounts, different accounts due to tax treatment, if I was to get the complete transaction history and maintain it in Moneydance for these accounts it would be an enormous and ongoing commitment, so, as the data is not available in a suitable format, I elected to manage it in Moneydance at a higher level and came up with a system to do so, that fits in with how Moneydance works, Quicken has a kludge approach to make it work with investment total value changes.
Do not think that Moneydance is perfect, certainly Quicken isn't, for example with shares I do have a spreadsheet with supporting data for each company shares that I own, this is to ensure that I have the necessary data to keep records on a lot basis (it is a requirement here), I can only partially do this in Moneydance as it has no Return of Capital function. Quicken does but it only partially works.
It really does come down to just how far you wish to go.
Moving to Moneydance in a way forced me to clean up the information I had, it also showed the shortcomings in Quicken, which could have landed me in trouble in the long run. I have much better data now, but can see that it is not possible to manage it in a single program. Somewhat like traditional accounting where they need to keep worksheets to support the 'books' I need to keep the computer equivalent (spreadsheets) to support what is in Moneydance.
I have gone as far as homing the spreadsheets within Moneydance's document tree so they get backed up with the Moneydance data.
11 Posted by dtd on 05 Aug, 2026 02:42 AM
dwg taught me, but I didn't go as far as he did. As I said, some people stop with my quick and dirty solution with quirky balances. I went somewhere inbetween that and dwg.
12 Posted by David on 05 Aug, 2026 03:06 AM
I'm currentlly giving it a shot of explaining the situation to Claude - then dumping it my individual account QIF files (5 of them) and telling it to fix them, and make them importable into Moneydance. It gave it a first shot - it seemed promising, it was honestly processing all the data and analyzing everything for a good almost 7+ minutes... It spit me out 5 new QIF files to import.
I was way too hopeful lol. I imported one of them that is less complex - and it DID convert everything into Buy/Cash and Sold/Cash - but alas, there is still something wonky with the Xfers and Fees, and junk that throws it off and it ends up importing at negative ~1.5m which is nowhere near what I want. Giving claude one more shot then I'm doing the dirty method advised heh.
13 Posted by dtd on 05 Aug, 2026 09:42 PM
Was there a reason you had 5 qifs instead of 1? The less you have with all the data the cleaner it is especially for xfers between accounts.
14 Posted by David on 05 Aug, 2026 10:00 PM
I was breaking it down by individual account - I started off with 1 big import - which was fine for a large number of accounts such as bank accounts and credit cards. But once it came time for investment accounts, I had to break it down to individual QIF files. I did a lot of manipulating with Claude AI and would deliberately tell Claude: "Here is my Quicken QIF - here is the Moneydance QIF. I want you to reconcile them and fix them to reflect eachother based on the ending balance in Quicken of $x"
Suffice it to say, I got to the end finally after all this. All my accounts are now tying out perfectly along with investment amounts, etc. The only thing that isn't...great... is... well.... the torture of having to put in initial opening balances in a few of them. It really does suck, because it entirely throws off my Net Worth graph for the foreseeable future until I use Moneydance for many many years.
While I TECHNICALLY "have" all the data, it's virtually worthless since it still boils down to inflated initial balances to fix the fallacies. This is WITH Claude being able to manipulate the data to have it being entered as Bought instead of BoughtX, etc.
Oh well, It was worth a shot.
15 Posted by dtd on 06 Aug, 2026 12:11 AM
I have my networth working over 35 years. It is doable, it does take hours of work, but if you see proper security balances, etc., most of it is getting rid of the X accounts (find/replace extension is your friend here, and creating some categories as dumping grounds The fallacies are 'mostly' MD rejecting quickens make/erase money, but there are some exceptions.
for me, (no claude) doing it all in one export saved some transfer issue balance pains, but i don't know what claude did.
16 Posted by dtd on 06 Aug, 2026 12:14 AM
one thing important for long time net worth is long security price histories for your long term investments
17 Posted by dwg on 06 Aug, 2026 12:40 AM
As dtd has said it is definitely doable.
While I did a lot of fixing up when I first migrated to Moneydance I did not do it all at that time. While in that initial migration I did not change anything in Quicken, I did do some coding to massage the data I had out of the program, before doing the import. This corrected some things but not all. I then did some changes once in Moneydance. So I had the basics done.
Since then I have revisited various things over time and have made further changes in stages. At time it has been just to refine things at other times more fundamental changes, like merging categories.
Software enhancements have also led me to question the techniques I have been using, for example when I first started using the software there were various payments and receipts occurring in on time period but really belongs to another, so I used the techniques of Accrual accounting to report on them in that way, with the availability of the tax date field being used in reports I have the choice to do it my old way or to use the tax date to reflect it, then I have the choice if I do change do I revise the past transactions, to make it simpler or do I just change the way I am doing it going forward.
I do not regard financial management as something you set and forget.
18 Posted by David on 06 Aug, 2026 01:18 AM
"definitely doable" - Can I get more of a step-by-step of how exactly?
Here is an example of the ABSOLUTE worst one - where I have to put in like a 1.5m initial balance. Here are some sample transactions of where the balance drops almost ~$400k between the transactions as an example.
Any insight into how I can fix these would definitely be appreciated. If I can get that net worth down to even something remotely reasonable that would be appreciated.
19 Posted by dtd on 06 Aug, 2026 03:57 AM
In one sense, your transaction list looks correct. You put in (initial value) a million dollars in cash assets which you used to purchase a lot of securities. Without the 1MM, you couldn't buy those securities, nor have them in that account. That's how the securities can be correct when all is said and done.
The whole point is where did the assets come from to allow for the buyxfr - quicken lets you create that 1mm out of thin air. now - you do say you did this willy nilly and that probably should be corrected in some way. still before your 10 years of data, you probably had assets, so the value has to be accounted for in some way.
You can change them to buy, but they still have to have a source of money to get that from.
Another way to deal with this (because you never had 1mm back then is to look at the buyxfr price - is that the value you bought the item for, or the current price (i.e all those years of appreciation?)
That's what I meant by long security history, --- as well as taxes - any buy or buyxfr should be at that dates price or if a true buyxfr - at the cost basis price.
As you say sounds like you did a lot of this willy nilly - that's where you either accept it and move on, or go - what was I thinking all that time - and take the time to fix it.
Many accept it (it's still as good as quicken unless the security prices don't match), dwg and I fiuxed it, but I'll admit, I was more consistent in our investment accounts, and my rasbbit holes were in a different area.
20 Posted by dtd on 06 Aug, 2026 04:03 AM
As to step by step - everyone is different. You can read vicissitudes if you care to spend the time (I wouldnt - and dwg and I wrote most of it) - but basically it verifies that qif is a totally inadequate conversion methodology - but that is all there is (and quicken does a terrible job of importing ITS OWN qif export).
It also shows that basic stuff (checking/savings/credit cards) works fairly well - and even security amounts and values work fairly well - it's taxes, histories, and willynilly stuff that can make it look very odd. You've found probably your major rabbit hole - and no - there is no stepbystep guide - otherwise there would be better conversion methods.
21 Posted by dtd on 06 Aug, 2026 04:05 AM
Still, this is not meant to discourage - it's quite doable, it's mostly figuring out you particular rabbit-hole and diagnosing how to either accept it or improve it. I'm interested in how Claude possibly 'thought' about it.
22 Posted by David on 07 Aug, 2026 12:06 AM
Whelp - I finally did it. I spent some more time with Claude, and went constantly back and forth with it NUMEROUS times. Claude would manipulate it as best it could. I would then Import the QIF into MoneyDance - I would then report on what I'm seeing (cash balance, shares, etc...) then export the resulting QIF result out of Moneydance, and reimport that into Claude so that it could see the results and compare.
Eventually over time, it was getting better and better and better at having either nothing - or a small nominal amount of cash leftover in these old-closed 401k accounts of data.
To put it simply, flipping boughtx to simply buy - AND along the way, inserting a miscInc for every single contribution that I didn't have paycheck funding for. So effectively, it was funding it piece by-piece, just like a paycheck with misc-inc. This is a gross simplification in 2 sentences though.
So I asked Claude to then summarize into bullet points what was done incase anyone else is interested or could use some pointers - below is what it said:
Unfunded "phantom" purchases (the core recurring bug)
** Self-referencing transactions — where a purchase was linked to a transfer from the account to itself — were being treated by Moneydance as a real, one-sided cash debit instead of netting to zero. Converted to plain Buy/Sell and, where it represented a purchase, paired with a matching injected income transaction on the same date so the money is actually accounted for.
** Share-arrival transactions (ShrsIn) carrying an explicit dollar value were being debited from cash with no funding source at all, since Moneydance treats "shares arrived" as "shares were bought." Same fix: convert to Buy, inject matching funding.
Some ShrsIn/ShrsOut entries had no stated dollar value but did have a price and quantity — Moneydance computes its own value from those (price × quantity) and debits/credits it anyway. Computed that value explicitly myself and applied the same fix, rather than leaving it for Moneydance to guess.
Fee-driven share reductions
** Recurring custodial/recordkeeping fees paid directly in shares (no cash ever really moves) were getting priced and credited as if they were real sales — creating phantom income. Converted these to Sell with the correct value, then added a matching offsetting expense transaction so the net cash effect is zero, matching what actually happened.
Transaction type reliability
** Bare Cash-type transactions proved unreliable on import — sometimes sign-flipped, sometimes silently recategorized. Replaced with MiscInc/MiscExp, which behaved predictably everywhere I tested it.
** A transaction's payee text accidentally matching an existing account name in the data caused Moneydance to reinterpret a plain credit as an outgoing transfer. Fixed by using neutral payee text that doesn't collide with any real account name.
Data integrity issues found along the way
** A phantom "security" that was really just a mistyped category (fees literally recorded as if they were a tradeable holding called "fees") — renamed to the real underlying fund.
** Small leftover share balances (a few ten-thousandths of a share) from floating-point rounding across many small transactions — zeroed out with tiny explicit correcting entries.
** Malformed file structure from stacking multiple edits without checking the seams — verified every final file against missing separators and empty/duplicate records before shipping.
Preserved, not touched
** Genuine external transfers (real paycheck contributions, real account-to-account rollovers) were kept exactly as originally recorded wherever you asked for that — no need to "fix" data that was already correct.
All of that to say - I finally have a file that I can start with and get off Quicken.... with all my prior data intact! Thanks folks for all the inputs. Actually 1 last step - I need to get historical + current security prices in place.