Major issues trying to evaluate MD
I was hoping I would find MD a better alternative to Q-Win. I followed the article for dumping all my Q data and loading it into MD from the start. All of my accounts and transactions were loaded. In examining the registers of my investment accounts, I encountered a few issues that are giving me real concerns about the software.
I wanted to test manually adding a new Buy transaction. The New Transaction button opens a new transaction at the bottom of the register. However, the Action is preset to Xfr and cannot be changed. I opened the popup action list, and selected Buy, but the field did not change.
I was examining one of my inherited IRA accounts. I went back to the initial transactions which were transferring in the shares I inherited. That was a ShrsIn transaction in the QIF file and MD turned it into a BuyXfr. I don't understand how BuyXfr is supposed to work if there isn't any source account, but it looks like it is just performing a Buy because the amount is being debited from the cash balance. My understanding is that ShrsIn should not impact the cash balance. It should just add the shares along with their price. I have attached a screenshot of some samples of the ShrsIn/BuyXfr transactions.
I don't know what is going on with the investment account transactions and registers, but I am not able to use the package as is.
Moneydance_investment_register.png
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1 Posted by dwg on 20 Oct, 2025 01:36 AM
Do you by chance have a security and an account with the same name?
2 Posted by Joe Rabinowitz on 20 Oct, 2025 04:31 AM
No. I scanned all the securities and accounts and there isn't any overlap.
On 10/19/2025 9:36 PM, dwg wrote:
3 Posted by dwg on 20 Oct, 2025 04:39 AM
The only way that the same name can appear in the security field is if there is some sort of name duplication. In the security field the name must be a security, but in the transfer field it can be an account or it can possibly be a category.
4 Posted by Stuart Beesley ... on 20 Oct, 2025 07:58 AM
To perform a BUY you have to go to the se security details tab, actions, add security.
There is no real shares transfer feature in MD. The way this is achieved is by performing a Buy (or Sell) of the shares, then Xfr (transfer) the cash to another account. You will either see a Sell/Xfr then a Buy, or a Sell then a BuyXfr. The buy/sell is usually done at the cost basis (not market value).
When I did my qif import years ago I remember that there were shares in/out txns that seemed to go between a category not an account. In fact what I did was manually delete each one of these and then renter them ‘properly’. Yes it was a pain, took a few hours. But then I had a very tidy MD database.
5 Posted by dwg on 20 Oct, 2025 08:15 AM
In my QIF importing I had some "extra" categories created as well as some "account_x" accounts created.
In those days it was the old importer so I ended up doing it in two stages, the first to create everything, then fix it up the structure, then import the data into the revised structure.
Given the ambiguity inherent in QIF, not totally surprising given the format's intent, and the rather loose approach taken by Quicken towards transaction posting it is not too surprising there are problems. Of course there are more issues seen in Investment accounts given the greater complexity of the transactions.
6 Posted by Joe Rabinowitz on 20 Oct, 2025 07:41 PM
Thank you for your response. I went through the painful process you
mention when I had to reconcile all my MS Money data that I loaded into
Quicken. It has its own issues with how it loads transfers and Roth
conversions.
I was hoping that the resulting Quicken dataset that I exported and
would load into MD without my having to go through another manual
adjustment process to get everything to balance once more. I find it
rather odd that there is no direct way to transfer shares since that is
obviously something that happens regularly in real investment accounts.
On 10/20/2025 3:58 AM, Stuart Beesley (Mr Toolbox) wrote:
7 Posted by dwg on 20 Oct, 2025 07:58 PM
While share transfers do occur, Moneydance is based on accounting principles so the 'value' has to also be transferred and that is the difficult bit with the way Moneydance has been designed.
Rather than the security account being self contained, which if it was, I believe it could be moved itself between accounts, it interacts with the Investment account it is contained in so that any monies relating to that security are contained or pass through the investment account.
In other words the designed I do not think allows for the possiblilty of moving shares in situ between investment houses within the software.