A myriad of problems
I've used Moneydance for about the past year. I have a Mac. Quicken Essentials for the Mac doesn't do it for me because it doesn't do investment accounts.
Over the past year I've noticed a myriad of problems:
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What's with the pop-up calendars in date fields? These are INCREDIBLY ANNOYING! I can type 1/25/2010 faster than I can click through that dumb pop-up calendar. This is pure lazy, folks -- It's not that hard to write routines that validate dates (especially in Java)...
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Why can't I change the 'beginning balance' in an account reconciliation dialog?
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Your downloaded-transaction classification scheme needs an overhaul. I get so many duplicate transaction entries that I spend twice as much time downloading transactions than I should. I avoid doing it because it's such a pain (most of my accounts are at a credit union).
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Why do I have to type in passwords for every blasted account I download? I should be able to store these (again...secure storage is not that hard to do in Java).
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Why can't I start a new financial year? It makes doing my taxes every year so much easier... Your 'Archive' scheme is needlessly complicated and error-prone.
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Transaction search is a joke!
I currently have a $1060 difference between my checking account balance in Moneydance and the balance reported by my bank. There's some duplicate transactions that I missed. I could solve this by doing successive reconciles starting at the first of the year...but, oh wait, the reconcile dialog won't let me change the beginning balance on an account (!?!?!)... This is making me wonder what else is wrong in my accounts. My financial setup is not that complicated -- checking, savings, a couple of credit cards and some investment accounts -- really, pretty simple.
I REALLY want to like Moneydance...really...but there's just too much wrong with it for me to continue with it much longer unless some of this stuff is fixed. You once told me that there was a new version coming out that would fix some of the problems with downloaded-transaction classification. When is that coming? I need help!
Regards,
Steve Witten
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1 Posted by Angie Rauscher on Feb 20, 2011 @ 08:41 PM
Steve,
Thanks for writing. I'm going to try to address your points one at a time.
1) It's possible to type in dates manually, and there are also keyboard shortcuts for date fields. You can find a list of these shortcuts in the Moneydance 2010 help documentation, which is located here.
2) The "Beginning Balance" is a calculated field which is the sum (or difference) of the opening balance of the account and all cleared transactions. The most common cause of a balance that is off is accidentally unclearing an old transaction. To check if this is the case, use the "Uncleared" filter.
3) How are you getting these transactions into Moneydance? Are you using the direct connect feature, or manually downloading and importing a file from your credit union's website? If it's the latter, what is most likely happening is that you are downloading the file in the QIF format. This format doesn't permit a unique transaction ID, so if a transaction is located in multiple imported files it will be imported multiple times. If your bank provides the option you should try using the OFX download format (sometimes referred to as a MS Money download), which has a unique transaction ID and should help avoid the duplicate issue.
4) You can store your passwords in your data file. To do so you will need to encrypt your data file. You can find instructions for encrypting in the Moneydance 2010 help documentation, which is located here.
5) We're considering including a fiscal year option, and are working on improving the archiving function, but it's not a feature which is at the top of our priority list. I'm interested to know what features you're looking for out of this that aren't met by the reporting and advanced search features? This would be helpful to us as we work to improve our program.
6) Could you be a bit more specific in what you're looking for from search? You can currently do an account specific search from within the register, a data file wide search from the search box when on the home page, and an advanced search from the Edit->Advanced Search Menu, and targeted searches from the Transaction report. Is there a need that we're not meeting through these features?
We're working on the the new release as we speak, and I'm thrilled with the improvements that I'm seeing. I don't have a release date at the moment (other than soon) but when we have one or when the release is available we'll certainly post on on our blog. I hope this info has been helpful, and if there are any other questions you have or issues you'd like to see addressed, please do let me know.
Angie Rauscher
Moneydance Support
2 Posted by stevewi on Feb 21, 2011 @ 01:09 AM
On Feb 20, 2011, at 12:41 PM, Angie Rauscher wrote:
<snip />
> 1) It's possible to type in dates manually
Thanks... Still, rather than pop up the calendar automatically, how about a button to pop it up. You have enough real estate in most of the dialogs where I've seen them if you shorten the date entry field a bit -- you could make them at least a third shorter and still have enough room to type the maximum-length date (12/31/2011).
> 2) The "Beginning Balance" is a calculated field which is the sum (or difference) of the opening balance of the account and all cleared transactions. The most common cause of a balance that is off is accidentally unclearing an old transaction. To check if this is the case, use the "Uncleared" filter.
More than likely, it's a duplicate transaction that's cleared. This is something I've seen before. Also, MD has a REALLY ANNOYING habit of marking cleared transactions as "Unaccepted". I've written extensively about this to Ben. There's an open bug about this.
Also, MD seems to spuriously change the payee and category of transactions. Yesterday, I was searching for something and the 'Advanced Find' showed two transactions. The Payee and Category had been changed to the Payee and Category of a transaction I had just changed because it was mis-categorized (and the Payee didn't match my search criteria at all).
The problem with not being able to find duplicate cleared transaction is that unless I can change the beginning balance to match the beginning balance on my bank statement, I have to wait until I get a new bank statement. If I reconcile BETWEEN statements (which I like to do frequently), the account reconciliation feature is terminally screwed up.
> 3) How are you getting these transactions into Moneydance?
Via direct download -- OFX.
> 4) You can store your passwords in your data file. To do so you will need to encrypt your data file. You can find instructions for encrypting in the Moneydance 2010 help documentation, which is located [here](http://s3.amazonaws.com/entp-tender-production/assets/69682df467c7f52812ca1588edeb6ff7c7afad39/Moneydance_2010_users_guide.pdf).
Thanks... However, I don't want to encrypt my file. If you guys should go away, my file is in XML which I can write software to read/recover (I spent 30+ years as a professional software developer). If it's encrypted, that process becomes that much harder to do. How about storing the passwords in another (encrypted) file?
> 5) We're considering including a fiscal year option, and are working on improving the archiving function, but it's not a feature which is at the top of our priority list. I'm interested to know what features you're looking for out of this that aren't met by the reporting and advanced search features? This would be helpful to us as we work to improve our program.
I was a Quicken user for many, many years. They had a function called 'Start New Year' that would create a new file from all the uncleared transactions in all accounts of the file that was currently open. All the balances were correctly brought forward, etc. I would do this on New Year's Day for the new year and archive my previous year's file (I only used it again to do my taxes).
> 6) Could you be a bit more specific in what you're looking for from search? You can currently do an account specific search from within the register, a data file wide search from the search box when on the home page, and an advanced search from the Edit->Advanced Search Menu, and targeted searches from the Transaction report. Is there a need that we're not meeting through these features?
Well, having Payees and Categories not spuriously change in the find results would help :-) ... see above. The dialog for 'Advanced Find' is very confusing and the few times I've used it, it didn't seem to be honoring my request properly. Have a look at the 'Advanced Find' function in 'Bento'...that's sort of my ideal model of a well-done Find function.
> We're working on the the new release as we speak, and I'm thrilled with the improvements that I'm seeing. I don't have a release date at the moment (other than soon) but when we have one or when the release is available we'll certainly post on on [our blog](http://moneydance.com/blog/). I hope this info has been helpful, and if there are any other questions you have or issues you'd like to see addressed, please do let me know.
I mostly want the problems with downloading fixed. It's such a pain that I don't do it often enough and I end up with hours of problems to fix (that is IF I can FIND all the problems).
I wish I could characterize the "spurious Payee & Category change" problem better but it seems to be pretty random.
Like I said, I want to like MD...really... But, since switching to it, I spend more time fixing mistakes that it causes than tracking my finances.
--
==========================================
Steve Witten [email blocked]
"...Everybody loves them dead presidents!"
-- W. Dixon
P.S. Typing in transactions is not an option. This is why God invented the Internet... :-)
3 Posted by stevewi on Mar 05, 2011 @ 05:11 PM
I just spent TWO HOURS straightening out a royal mess in my accounts after a download of transactions from my credit union that:
This is unacceptable! I reiterate that your transaction matching scheme needs an overhaul. I need relief from these problems and, at this point, I'm not sure I can wait for your new version as I have no assurance that any of these problems will be fixed.
Regards,
Steve Witten
4 Posted by stevewi on Mar 06, 2011 @ 06:01 PM
Another download and another two or three occurrences of 3026... THERE IS ONE OF THESE I CAN'T GET RID OF!!!!!! No matter if I 'Accept' it or 'Revert' it (and fix the damage this does to my account), the same transaction downloads again (and again and again) and marks the same CLEARED transaction as 'Unaccepted' (it's a third of a 'split' transaction from an account where stock sales are deposited -- part of a monthly pension distribution -- the other 2/3 of the split are for withheld taxes)! This is incredibly frustrating!!! How do I fix this?
This problem has been sitting in your queue since I first reported it 8 months ago...do you think you guys could issue a patch or something?
Please help!
Regards,
Steve Witten
5 Posted by stevewi on Mar 07, 2011 @ 04:03 PM
On Mar 6, 2011 @ 10:01 AM, Steve Witten wrote:
I finally fixed this by changing the way I account for pension distributions and withheld taxes -- another 3 or 4 hours worth of work! What a pain!
Regards,
Steve Witten
6 Posted by Angie Rauscher on Apr 28, 2011 @ 02:53 PM
Steve,
I just wanted to let you know that the preview release of Moneydance 2011 is out, and it does change how we deal with downloaded transactions. I'm not sure if it will solve everything described above, but I personally find it to be a significant improvement. You can find details on the Moneydance preview release on our blog. We haven't yet implemented ticket 3026, but I have asked our developer to take another look at it to determine if it should be included in the next release. I'll let you know what he says, and I've attached the ticket to this thread so you'll be updated.
Please let me know if I can be of further assistance,
Angie Rauscher
Moneydance Support
System closed this discussion on Mar 31, 2015 @ 03:32 PM.