transfer of Quicken transactions.
Using Quicken for Windows and would like to migrate to MAC financial software. Your user guide does not show an investment transaction equivalent to Quicken's "Adjust shares in account" which I have used frequently. What will happen to all the placeholders created by that transaction when I try and transfer to Moneydance?
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1 Posted by Scott Meehan on 20 Apr, 2015 04:30 PM
Hi Aileen,
I'm not familiar with that function in Quicken, so I'm not exactly sure how it will be handled. We do, however, offer a free trial version of our software that you can use to test to find out and see if the results work for you.
If you haven't already, I encourage you to download our free trial version and experiment with the program before you decide if you would like to purchase it. The demo version is fully functional and allows you to manually enter 100 transactions. Imported transactions are not limited, so you'll be able to fully test connections with your bank. If you decide to purchase the program at a later date you can keep all your data, the license key simply unlocks the ability to manually enter more transactions. You can download the trial version of Moneydance from here:
http://infinitekind.com/downloads
For more information on how to get the most out of your trial period, check out our [blog post on the subject](http://infinitekind.com/blog/getting-the-most-out-of-your-moneydance-trial).
Please let me know if I can be of further assistance, and thank you for your interest in Moneydance!
Scott Meehan
Infinite Kind Support
Scott Meehan closed this discussion on 20 Apr, 2015 04:30 PM.
Aileen Fisher re-opened this discussion on 20 Apr, 2015 06:10 PM
2 Posted by Aileen Fisher on 20 Apr, 2015 06:10 PM
Hi Scott
Thanks for getting back to me. Regardless of how the transaction is handled on conversion, I would want that functionality as a transaction in Moneydance. So, is there some way to just adjust the number of shares in an investment account other than with a buy, reinvest, sell or transfer? If not, is it something you would consider for a future enhancement?
Aileen
3 Posted by Tom Freeman on 21 Apr, 2015 06:28 PM
I am curious as to the event that causes the shares adjusting. Moneydance is programmed on double entry accounting. The changes in the various accounts are based on transactions occurring and the consequences of those transactions on your accounts.
Allowing the ability to make changes to accounts in the absence of transactions justifying such is a difficult case to make to the developers.
Tom Freeman
Infinite Kind Support
4 Posted by dwg on 21 Apr, 2015 09:57 PM
Tom,
there are a number of usage cases even some that Quicken recommend, I can think of a couple from my days using the software
When using Dividend reinvest when the company tells you the value of a share the software does a division that usually would result in a fractional number of shares. Add/Remove is used to round to a whole number of shares, the company would usually state beforehand how they do the rounding.
There is a type of Mutual fund that invests in other mutual funds where the investor determines which funds to invest in and what ratio of funds. Thus the fund you invest in does NOT have a unit price just a total value. In many cases it is difficult or just plain too much work to maintain data on the individual funds and transactions (i have one of these master funds that invests in 18 individual funds) In quicken you use Add/Remove (and the software understands that in mutual funds it means increase/decrease in value) to maintain the funds value in the software.
Tom, are you saying that MD is doing double entry transactions based on the share price downloads to provide the displayed current values? If so that would mean a lot of hidden revaluation accounts and transactions. I doubt it would. Splits are also something that while it does not change total values changes individual values, in accounting books this would likely be a journal entry somewhere. So while I am convinced MD follows many double entry practices I believe there are some departures. It is in Investments is where I believe these departures would be most often seen as what a user wants and needs to do for personal financial management differs to what is strictly done in a set of accounting books.
My 2 cents
Des
5 Posted by Aileen Fisher on 22 Apr, 2015 04:04 PM
Hi Tom
My use for this transaction is to correct user lapses in updating dividend reinvestments in mutual funds. If you have over 20 mutual funds and the bond funds have monthly dividends it's a lot of data entry when you only do it at the end of the year or only if you buy or sell. So occasionally when you go to sell all the shares of the fund you find there's some shares missing or extra it's very time consuming to go back and find the error. In that case I just update the number of shares which get sold so the dollar amount of the sale and share price are correct. Not necessarily a good excuse for this transaction but Quicken must have added it for a reason as it is a relatively recent capability
S
Sent from my iPad
6 Posted by Tom Freeman on 27 Apr, 2015 12:50 PM
@dwg Moneydance does have a number of hidden transactions for the revaluation of Investments because of splits and other transaction types. This is why programming the investment accounts have been so problematic.
Specifically addressing the fractional shares for dividend or splits, if a company does not allow fractional shares there is usually a transaction for "cash in lieu of" which increases your cash balance in the investment account. This also adjusts the cost basis appropriately
As for #2, we have had some issue with certain UK investment types such as unit trusts which don't fit the traditional share price model. Since the funds are based on a total value it is easier to class these as asset account rather than investments. An investment is a type of asset account and the asset account gives more options in transactions.
@Aileen. When you get your year end statement, you should be able to run a investment transaction report edited for this account and this year and it should mirror your statement. So finding missing entries should be easy. Also many people use the online banking feature to download transactions into their investment account and only use their statements to reconcile.
The issue that the developers want to to avoid is that allowing a user to change share count and share price without corresponding transactions could lead to errors in cost basis reporting as well as deviating from the double entry bookkeeping that Moneydance is based on.
Tom Freeman
Infinite Kind Support
7 Posted by dwg on 27 Apr, 2015 10:05 PM
Tom,
When I first migrated to MoneyDance I did try the Asset type for these investments, however I was not satisfied with the performance monitoring reports I could get out of this type.
I did work around the fraction share issue by not using DivReinv but by doing a Dividend then a Buy then a Misc inc or Exp to get rid of the remaining cash balance when I was faced with this situation.
There needs to be some hidden transactions for Return of Capital too :)
I'm thinking there needs to be a concerted effort to get share transaction handling up to the level it should be at.
The other usage case for add and remove shares is splits now that you mention them. I see many cases where they result in a fraction number of shares that needs to be dealt with, fiddling with the split ratio gets rather tiresome and doesn't always work.
Des
8 Posted by Tom Freeman on 04 May, 2015 12:02 PM
I will pass this feedback on to the developers
Tom Freeman
Infinite Kind Support
System closed this discussion on 19 Mar, 2016 04:54 AM.