Switching from Mint (previously from Quicken), trying to simplify, but....
Howdy,
I've been using Mint as my primary personal finance tracking for about 18 months now, and I'm trying to switch over to MoneyDance (2011). Previous to Mint I had used Quicken for 9 or 10 years. In Quicken, I had been a meticulous tracker, tracking pre-tax salary (using splits for taxes, transfer to 401k accounts, etc..), using liability accounts and splits to track loans vs. interest, etc... But, it probably took 1 or 2 hours a week or more, even with online syncing, due to having to do the splits manually (for example to get the loan interest exactly correct). Then I started to use Mint, and I started to "unclench" by tracking post-tax salary and all loans as opaque expenses (e.g. rather than knowing one debit split to 2 student loan accounts, each with a different amount of interest, it became a single "Student Loan" debit in Mint). This reduced time I spent fussing over transactions to near zero, with the added benefit that knowing post-tax income/expense flows ended up being easier to understand for planning than knowing what % of my income went to federal taxes. It's a slight bummer to lose track of my escrowed mortgage split (insurance and taxes), my student loan interest, etc... but it's a small price to pay for my time :-) Note that I do NOT use personal finance tools as imports to tax tools. I use institutional forms (W2, 1099, etc...) and receipts (usually charities) to prepare taxes.
Sorry for the long setup. If you're still reading, I first
imported my old Quicken file to MoneyDance (which worked great).
Then, I started exporting/importing CSV's from Mint. That was less
good, but it mostly worked. What I was hoping to do next:
-"Flatten" all of my old paycheck and loan splits from the Quicken
era to be simple categories (Student Loan, Mortgage, Salary,
etc...) -Change all assest & liability accounts to NOT cross
link, and instead track itself independently (for net worth). E.g.
what used to be the student loan account, with transfers from my
checking account will now still be a student loan account, but
every once and awhile I'll have a balance adjustment against
itself. I believe these two changes will keep my day-to-day work
minimal (as all transactions will map to simple categories), while
keeping the reports correct.
But, I don't see an easy way to "flatten" splits to a single category. You can't click the split to edit the whole spit at once. And you can't "batch change" a split to a single category. It will take me forever to make this change. I'm a long time Java coder, so if my best option is writing my own extension, that is on the table. From what I've seen of MoneyDance so far, I'm willing to put in the effort. It reminds me of what I liked about Quicken 10 years ago, and I trust it more than Mint (which has really gone downhill).
Thanks!
will
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1 Posted by paleolith on May 15, 2011 @ 05:39 PM
Will,
If I followed you all the way ;-), what you'll find helpful is to go the the main entry for one of the transactions whose splits you want to flatten. Then do "show other side" until you reach the register for a category or account that you want to combine with another. Select All, right-click, batch change, Account. (Note that in the current version you need to change the Account to move the transactions into another register, even if the register currently showing is a category. There's been some discussion of this confusing point, and it may change in the future.) Use the popup to select the account or category to merge into. Then delete the empty account/category if you wish. You'll have to do this for each split "other side" but not for each transaction.
If you get it wrong, Undo works even on batch changes.
Edward
2 Posted by oberman on May 15, 2011 @ 05:45 PM
I think I got it... I didn't think of trying account. Thanks!
3 Posted by oberman on May 16, 2011 @ 10:50 PM
It's bee a few days since I had a chance to try this out. It's worked great for my simple liability accounts so far, thanks again!
But, I have another challenge for my more complex liability accounts. For example, my mortgage/escrow. In quicken, each payment to my mortgage company was recorded as a split to escrow (increasing the balance), to the mortgage loan (decreasing the balance) and interest (local to checking account ledger). My goal after my set of changes is to have the checking account show N payments to "Mortgage or Rent", but also N reductions in the Loan account (since I tracked it already anyways). Plus, this would allow my net worth graph to properly slowly step up, as I paid off this loan. My hope was I could select the N transactions in the loan, and duplicate them all. Then, I could batch change the N new transactions to be balance adjustments. Then, I could clean up the splits in the original N transactions.
But, there doesn't seem to be an option to multi-select + duplicate. And doing N duplication operations would, once again, take quite some time. Is there another clever idea? The overall idea seems to work, as I did this with a simpler account that only had 6 transactions (by doing the duplicate, change in liability, change splits).
4 Posted by oberman on May 17, 2011 @ 12:57 AM
I thought of trying to export an account and then importing it (to do a batch duplicate), with possibly doing a text edit to "fix" the categories and prevent merging. But, when I went to export, it always dumps the entire file, even when I select an account. Bug?
5 Posted by paleolith on May 17, 2011 @ 03:01 AM
I'm really not following you this time. As normally set up in MD, a mortgage payment does exactly what you describe: debits checking (bank account), credits loan (principal), credits interest (expense category), and credits escrow (which I set up as a bank account though there are other ways). I get all this with a single transaction, so I'm not understanding where you need to duplicate transactions.
I agree that some of the export options are confusing at best, and possibly wrong. Exporting one account to a tab-separated file appears to yield the setup information for the selected account but all transactions whether they involve that account or not.
However, I would not trust any manipulations on TSV or QIF files. If you want to do direct manipulation, do it in either a copy of the .md file (which is text) or in the XML export. These are guaranteed to have all the necessary cross-reference information.
But I don't think you need that. Though as I said, I'm not quite sure what you are looking for. I think I've manipulated an export file exactly once, to change an account type. I've looked at the .md and XML files occasionally, but have not (in five years) had any further need to make changes that way.
Oh and BTW, making a payment on the principal of a loan does not increase your net worth, since it's just transferring assets from one account to another, both of which you own (bank account to loan liability). What increases your net worth is depositing the paycheck which enables you to make the mortgage payment. Of course you are correct that you need the loan liability to track correctly in order to get accurate net worth numbers.
Edward
6 Posted by oberman on May 17, 2011 @ 11:25 AM
This is all very had to describe in words.
What I have now:
Data imported from Quicken => Checking = Payment to mortgage, split {loan, interest, escrow}, Loan = Other side of checking, Escrow = Other side of checking
Data imported from Mint => Checking = Payment to mortgage, no split
What I plan to do with future transaction downloads => Checking = Payment to mortgage, no split, Loan = If I feel like it, manually tweak the balance
My plan moving forwards is more Mint-like than Quicken-like, so I was going to change the Quicken imported data. My hope there was:
In loan account => change all transfers from checking to be balance reductions.
In checking account => Unsplit all payments to be flat mortgage payments
In escrow account => Delete all transactions (I guess I'll just view escrow in/out flows as an expense)
Doing the checking & loan changes at the same time seems to be impossible, which makes sense as the transactions are linked. So, I was going to duplicate the loan amounts as new transactions, "freeing" the checking account transactions. Then, I could unsplit the checking account transactions without affecting the loan, but I'd keep the loan reductions. (I ignored escrow, but that has been a 0 sum account, so I was just going to blow it away in the checking account unsplit step). Basically, I'm changing the loan checking payments from "hard linked" to "loosely coupled", so that the loan balance can be updated by myself to get a more accurate net worth, but I don't have to do it every payment (my original goal from the first post == saving me some time on the day-to-day)
7 Posted by paleolith on May 18, 2011 @ 04:07 PM
OK, I see what you are saying. But if you want to track the loan balance, what's the advantage to decoupling? Seems to me you are making more work for yourself rather than less. It would be different if you didn't care about the loan balance. The loan balance probably won't be exact (banks use various methods to compute the interest), but it will be within a few dollars. You've cared about the details in the past; do you want to throw away details which you might care about in the future? I figure I spend about ten minutes a month tracking the mortgage splits, including reconciling ... less than I've spent on this note. :-)
But if you really want to do that, why bother changing the historical transactions? Leave them alone, put in balance adjustments to bring the balances to where you want them, and move forward. The old transactions will quickly move out of sight in the registers. If you want to report on the total amount paid to all the mortgage categories, run a report selecting all the relevant categories.
I agree that tracking the escrow isn't necessary, at least in the US where the banks are now under tight regulations on how they handle the escrow. I find, though, that it takes very little time. I change the escrow amount when I get the notice that the payment has changed, and you will have to change the payment amount even if you don't separate the escrow. Probably takes me ten minutes a year to reconcile the escrow, and that way I know when my insurance and property tax were paid. Yes, I use the end-of-year statement to verify that the property tax was paid for income tax purposes, and Wells Fargo is reliable about paying the insurance and I don't worry about it. Still. ;-)
Edward
8 Posted by oberman on May 18, 2011 @ 08:38 PM
Hrmmm.... everything you said makes sense. I'm not in front of the program right now, but I think my original problem was how the different tracking schemes affected reporting, and I was trying to consolidate to one system (the simpler, Mint-like one).
Before I was a homeowner, I tracked rent in quicken as a simple expense. And the imported mint transactions (when I was already a home owner) were marked as a simple expense (mortgage). Both are subcategories of "home". But, the quicken tracked data when I was a home owner are splits to various accounts. So, I believe my reports shows (from old to new): home expenses at a certain level, nothing, home expenses at a certain level. And I was trying to that nothing timeline to get fixed. Maybe it's a reporting option, I'll mess with that.
Thanks again for all of the help & advice Edward.
9 Posted by paleolith on May 19, 2011 @ 01:17 AM
Another report you might look at is Account Balances. You can select accounts and the as-of date. So for example, selecting just your checking account and reporting as of the first day of two consecutive months would tell you how your position changed in that month. If you include liabilities like loans, you get something close to your net worth. If you only include the bank account(s) you pass your monthly funds through, you get more of a cash flow report.
Edward
System closed this discussion on Mar 31, 2015 @ 03:37 PM.