Dear Derek/ Moneydance
I still have work to do moving from Microsoft Money to Moneydance, but with one exception (Credit Card accounts - see below), I am thinking that maybe I now need to get into simply grinding my way through each of my Moneydance accounts putting in line by line corrections every time there is a deviation from the actual history based on Money.
My reason for that rests mainly on the fact that I have so far fairly successfully moved across from Microsoft Money into Moneydance all of the 17 accounts which (it seems) can correctly be treated within Moneydance as Bank accounts.
The main outstanding task would seem to be transfer and cleaning up of the Investment accounts – there are 16 of them, albeit I recognise that there were 32 to be imported since each such account has an Investment element and a Cash/Bank element. There seems to be a lot to do, but perhaps I just have to face up to this and get going.
Some General Background, mainly on the Investment accounts
In case it helps, here are a few facts about the data on Money.
                  The entries go back over 30 years. One or two even go back to the mid-1980s.
                  Of the 16 investment accounts, 7 relate to shares in my pre-retirement employing company, Legal & General, 4 of which are still current (separate holdings in my and my wife’s names, with each of us having both directly-held shares and shares held via ISAs) and 3 of which relate to holdings that were current for me before I retired (eg profit-sharing-scheme related holdings). There are no shares presently in the latter three but during the period they were active there were interactions with other accounts.
                  Of the other 9 investment accounts, 3 are currently active, ie ISAs for each of my wife and me (those not invested in L&G shares) and a single account for Premium Bonds. The other 6 no longer have any investments current but (as I see it) need to be cleaned up so that interactions with other accounts are correctly portrayed.
Presently identified problems with the Investment Accounts
I am presently wrestling with a number of issues in several of these accounts.
1. The first issue is I guess self-inflicted. When I was first importing the data, I did not realise that when setting up the Investments side of the data I should have first set up each such account as an Investment account. In my innocence I thought this would be done automatically. Later I did realise what had happened so went back, set up an Investment account and have done so, and then imported the Investments related qif files. I wonder though whether having done things this way I have created problems in the resulting data on the Moneydance side. I am hoping I can delete all the incorrectly-created Bank accounts that correspond to the Investments data from Money. Maybe this will sort some of my other problems, though I am not counting on this. Does this deletion of the incorrectly-set-up Bank-style Investment files look to be a sensible thing to you?
2. In the L&G share-related accounts, the older entries when it comes to Buy and Sell transactions are, in the Moneydance version showing share prices and numbers of shares created which are either 1,000 or even 100,000 times higher or lower than what they should be. The errors cancel each other out insofar as they result in the correct amount paid for the shares, but I suspect that the number of shares I hold may have been calculated wrongly. Can I just go back and re-enter the Buy/Sell transactions with corrected share prices and numbers of shares?
3. In the Premium Bonds account, the Moneydance version produces the wrong number of ‘shares’, ie Bonds, according to Portfolio View. And yet when I have gone through all the Buy transactions (we haven’t sold any Bonds) it adds up to the correct number. Why might it be having this trouble in adding the number of Bonds up correctly?
4. Also in the Premium Bond account on Moneydance, most the history of prizes has been duplicated, ie two entries for each ‘prize’. (I recognise that this may well be a result of my incorrect first attempt at importing.) I am reconciled that I will need to go through all these transactions and delete one of the duplications.
5. Virtually none of these show the prize money as having been transferred to my current bank account (even though that is what happened in the real world) and is shown as having happened in the Money records. So what is shown in Moneydance is a growth in apparent ‘cash’ carried forward within the Premium Bond account. Am I right that I just have to instruct Moneydance in each case to make the necessary transfer to our Current account?
6. Most of the transactions for Premium Bonds shown in Moneydance prior to 7th Jan 2007 have the comment “Imported information was incorrect”. What might have happened here? It doesn’t seem to have happened for any of the other accounts.
7. I am going to have to do work on what I have called my SharesGen account, now ‘empty’, which showed purchases, sales and dividends in a number of the privatisation companies that were floated in the mid-1980s. We held them for around 30 years mostly. During this period there were various further share issues and my recording of the transactions in Money got a bit complex. I’m not greatly surprised that these movements did not import cleanly, but am reasonably confident I can find a way to translate the history across to Moneydance.
Credit Card Accounts
I have also done an Export / Import exercise on our 2 Credit Card accounts. This has not worked so well, in two ways. Firstly it has only picked up transfers from our main current account and has failed to pick up anyof the records of amounts spent using the cards. Secondly it only started picking up transactions, on either of the cards, on 30th May 1995, failing to pick up any of the earlier transactions (which started on either 1st April 1990 or on 12th Jan 1992). I would appreciate advice as to how to fix this. Should I perhaps delete the two Credit Card accounts I presently have on Moneydance, set up ‘new’ Moneydance accounts (specifying them as Credit Card accounts, which I have to say I already did first time) and then repeat the Export / Import