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Quicken 2008 users -- Don't delay, migrate today!

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FlyTigr

16 Apr, 2011 02:10 AM

I was once upon a time a happy Quicken 1998 user forced unhappily to migrate to 2005 and 2008 when Intuit killed QIF imports and then shut off QFX downloads the first time. I've been a slave to Intuit for years--until last week. If you have any doubts about migrating from Quicken to Moneydance (windows versions), I write this to put your mind at ease. I just did it and I feel like a liberated Middle Eastern country. See ya later, dictator.

The easy part is using Moneydance. I am rejoicing in finding a fully functional, reliable, intuitive financial tool that lets me still direct-connect to my banks and update my data without Intuit getting in the way and pulling the plug every three years for a forced downgrade. Moneydance supports direct-connect from banks offering the non-proprietary OFX format. I am hooked up to USAA and TD Ameritrade just fine. This program is more spreadsheet-like and intuitive than Quicken 2005, 2008, and onward. It has fully satisfied a user of Quicken since 1994. If only I could export my Quicken Home Inventory data (Quicken offers no export function for this)..

The hard part is deciding how far back in time to go with transferring in your data. I originally was going to go all the way back to 1994, but all the bank accounts and loans that I no longer have open would have to be recreated and re-reconciled. Once I decided only to go back a year, it was much easier. Still had to export each account individually from Quicken as a QIF and import into Moneydance. Some duplicate transactions were created, but they were easy to detect as they are not reconciled (be sure to reconcile everything in Quicken before the exports).

I am so happy to finally be free of the money-sucking and software-sucking Intuit--except for my home inventory. If someone has a solution for that, I'd be delighted to hear it.

1. 1 Posted by Ben Spencer on 18 Apr, 2011 04:06 PM

   

   Hi

   I am glad to see that you are pleased with the transition to Moneydance. If you need any specific help let me know and I will try to assist you.

   I am afraid Moneydance does not have any specific functionality for handling home inventory. If you want to represent the value of your inventory you could create an asset account called "Home Inventory" and then create an asset account for each item in your inventory setting the initial balance on those account to be the value of the item and setting the parent on those accounts to be "Home Inventory".

   Sincerely
   Ben Spencer
   Moneydance Support

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2. 2 Posted by FamCamper on 18 Apr, 2011 06:28 PM

   

   Ben,

   Thanks for the email. Great to hear from real people actively working on improving their product instead of just trying to scheme a way to extract more money from a captive customer base (you know who I mean).

   I am pretty proud of myself for spending much of the past week laboriously extracting 17 years of my Quicken Home Inventory data: first as a 117-page text file all in one column, then manipulating it extensively in Word with replace-alls and various clean up operations, then parsing it into Excel, and finally manipulating it with Transpose and Index functions into a twelve-column spreadsheet.

   For now, that is good enough. If there was an add-in or macro to export the data from a transaction in Moneydance into a mappable row of data elements in Excel, I would be happy to live with this solution in perpetuity. Excel has all the tools to filter and sort, I just need a clean way to transfer individual purchase data in from $D.

   I would think now is a very fruitful time to be working on a Quicken-to-Moneydance migration path. 27 April is the sunset of Quicken 2008, which was the version Quicken 2005 users were forced into, which was the first forced-obsolence version with the dropping of QIF import. That is a large bow-wave of users, and I'm sure many are as unhappy and as highly motivated to cut the cord with Intuit as I was if a worthy alternative was to be found--and fortunately, one now does exist.

   -Todd

   -----Original Message-----
   From: Ben Spencer [mailto:[email blocked]]
   Sent: Monday, April 18, 2011 11:06
   To: [email blocked]
   Subject: Re: Quicken 2008 users -- Don't delay, migrate today! [Praise]

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3. Angie Rauscher closed this discussion on 23 Nov, 2012 02:52 PM.