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MD2010 Unable to import ... AT ALL

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davegnotta

08 Dec, 2009 03:23 AM

HI folks,

I was a long time Quicken user (15 years or so) who finally found a better program called Prospects. Unfortunately I had one serious bug and they seem to have gone out of business as there are no longer responses to any issues or inquires.

Today I found an article about Moneydance 2010. I downloaded the trial version and poked around; imported some qif files that came directly from my bank. Things looked pretty good so I decided to take the plunge and purchased a new license.

I have spent the last hour trying to figure out why NOTHING happens when I import a qif file from my old software. I used the Export function in Propects to first create a single large file with everything. Absolutely NOTHING happened when I imported. This is not a case of errors during import ... I mean NOTHING happened. NO info came into Moneydance.

I eventually found on your board a discussion where another user was being told that Moneydance cannot import everything as one file. So I went back to Prospects and exported just my main checking account. Going back to Moneydance I tried the import again ... again NOTHING.

Just fyi ... yes I followed the instructions to import the "account info only" first (nothing happened) then with this box unchecked (still nothing happened)

HELP! This software looks like what I am looking for ... but I can't even get started to try it out.

Thanks for any help you can provide!

1. 1 Posted by Simon on 08 Dec, 2009 06:44 AM

   

   Hi; I have used Prospects. the issue here isn't Moneydance. The problem you have, which I also had, is that Prospects is not completing an export to QIF correctly or at all.

   If you try and import a QIF generated by Prospects to almost any (I tried quite a few) software you will find nothing happens.

   Prospects appears to be dead and unsupported now; which is why I was pleased to return to Moneydance after using the software previously.

   Dependant on how much data you have in Prospects your only option may be to re-type into Moneydance by hand.

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2. 2 Posted by Angie Rauscher on 10 Dec, 2009 04:14 AM

   

   Dave,

   I am sorry to say that I have no experience with Prospects, but if you are comfortable sending us your QIF in a private case we are happy to look at it and see if we can make some magic happen (which from the other user's advice seems unlikely).

   I'm sorry I can't be of more help, but please let me know if I can be of further assistance, and thank you for your interest in Moneydance.

   Angie Rauscher
   Moneydance Support

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3. 3 Posted by Juan Colomina on 11 Dec, 2009 05:01 PM

   

   Hi Angie,

   I had the same issue as the user above and being a developer myself I did some quick research and found two main issues with the Prospect QIF files.

   1. Prospect files are in Unicode (UTF-16 Little-Endian) as reported by TextWrangler, which Moneydance completely ignores. When converted to plain ASCII Western (Mac OS Roman) by TextWrangler the import works fine.

   2. There is only one big flaw in the Prospects QIF files and that is that it has a !Type:Bank header line on every single transaction. It seems this header line should only be on the first transaction within a list of transactions. With an original Prospects QIF file and selecting the "New Account" option on the Moneydance import dialog you will end up creating a new account for every single transaction!

   You can avoid this problem on by exporting each account on Prospects on separate QIF files and then importing into Moneydance onto existing empty accounts. In this case you only need to convert the Prospects file to ASCII with TextWrangler (which is free), or any other program of the sort, and it will work, or at least it does with my account files.

   I hope this helps.
   Cheers,
   Juan

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4. 4 Posted by davegnotta on 11 Dec, 2009 08:37 PM

   

   Hi Juan,

   Thank you for taking the time to post this solution.

   Unfortunately I must not being doing something right, as I have not yet been able to get this to work.

   I downloaded Textwrangler and used it to open my qif file. Then I went to "Save As" and the ONLY change I made was to the "Encoding" which I changed to "Western - Mac OS Roman"

   I then tried to import the resulting saved file into Moneydance. I tried both importing it into a "New Account" and also tried into "an Existing Account (which was empty - no data in it) In both cases I got the same result ... nothing happened.

   Would you mind helping me out and walking me through the process you used ... in as much step by step detail as you can?

   This would be a godsend if I can get it to work!! Thank you again for your help!!

   PS - I tried to attach a screenshot of the changes I made in the Save As dialog box, just so you could see what I was doing.

   Note to Angie .... I've gone ahead and begun setting up new accounts in Moneydance for going forward, even if I can't import my old data. I certainly don't want to keep using Prospects knowing all my data will be permanently "trapped". I am finding Moneydance 2010 to be a great program that looks like it will fit my needs. Thank you for your offer to help me. If I can't get this to work with Juan's help ... I may take you up on your offer.

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5. 5 Posted by Juan Colomina on 11 Dec, 2009 09:45 PM

   

   Hi Dave,

   I have tried to enter some options you may have chosen by mistake to see if I can reproduce your trouble, but regardless of the options it always imports something, even if wrong, once the file is in Mac OS Roman. In any case make sure the following options are as follows:

   File Source: From Another Program
   Date Format: (whatever matches your QIF file, check the file on TextWrangler, should be easy to see the date format)
   SEE INCLUDED IMAGE

   I just tried importing a 1000+ transaction file from Prospects and although it took a good 5 minutes it imported perfectly, even with categories and subcategories. When you export from Prospects try to deactivate the Categories option, they will be imported anyways from your transactions, and may give less trouble exporting only the account transactions.

   If all these options don't work you may not have any other option than to send your export file to Moneydance support or to me (but I can understand you may not want to do that, I wouldn't!).

   A test you may be willing to do is to create a new Prospects account, add a couple of fake transactions and try to export them to Moneydance. If that import doesn't work you can send me that test file and we can see what is the problem. If the test file works for you then your last resort as I said will be to send the full transaction file.

   Best of luck!
   Juan

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6. Angie Rauscher closed this discussion on 24 Jul, 2011 07:05 PM.