The Vicissitudes of Quicken to Moneydance
Ok. I'm ready to move. I did the QIF dance (thankfully I'm still on Quicken 2017) and am majorly impressed by what I end up with in Moneydance.
There are two big issues that I currently see. (I've only been looking things over for an hour or so)
CASH BALANCES are wonky. YES - I know the "Initial balance" bit. All those are fine (now). Most credit cards, cash, and accounts that never interacted with other accounts are beautiful. But with 20 years of data, and with tons of investment accounts that came and went, transfers between accounts (like creating an account, and populating it with securities) totally mess up the cash balance.
This is a pretty big deal as it affects tons of my older accounts that should have a zero CASH balance, but scream "fix me"!
The securities, their amounts, and balances are fine. But Quicken has an "ADD-Shares Added" attribute which specifically says "add shares to this account without affecting the cash balance". I doubt the QIF file tells Moneydance this, so no blame, but sure enough a lot of negative cash balance occurs as the transaction "buys" these shares. In fact it is doubly bad, as it ends up being a BUYXFR in Moneydance, so that ends up doubling the cash change.
Another bit is an account charging an item to its own category. (i.e. a writeoff - I have a CAR category and occasionally depreciate the car by putting in a transaction that just writes off a few thousand bucks on it) - whatever the QIF sends causes Moneydance to create a CARX category that I guess "absorbs" the writeoff. Makes it difficult to figure out, again with years of data.
Thirdly - sometimes it seems the positive/negative is backwards for the Quicken QIF import - so what is a charge becomes a deposit or vice versa. This seems to be a well known issue here, but still a pain to reverse everything by hand. I tried the find/replace extension, but since values are different, it looks like I will have to do each of the "bad" accounts by hand.
As a point of order - what determines for an investment account what goes into register, bank register, and securities detail? Although these seem accurate (other than, again cash balances), I'm trying to figure out Moneydance's categorization for those three tabs.
Overall, I'm impressed, but with 20 years of data, there's a lot of cleanup (mostly cash balances) to do. I'm tempted to just have a transition day that has tons of entries of cash changes to zero and call it quits and move forward since most of the securities and credit cards and such are perfect, but I'm afraid that would ultimately give me nightmares.
Thoughts appreciated.
Showing page 4 out of 4. View the first page
Comments are currently closed for this discussion. You can start a new one.
Keyboard shortcuts
Generic
| ? | Show this help |
|---|---|
| ESC | Blurs the current field |
Comment Form
| r | Focus the comment reply box |
|---|---|
| ^ + ↩ | Submit the comment |
You can use Command ⌘ instead of Control ^ on Mac
91 Posted by harold on 04 Mar, 2021 04:13 PM
@dwg: yes, I had imported all my data from Quicken into MD but I lost the ability to download bank transactions in 2019 so I have not been using Quicken since then. I had lost the ability to download investment transactions in Quicken after the bank made some changes many years ago, so it will be a step up if I can download the investment transactions in CSV format into a new dummy bank account and cut and paste the data into the investment account (rather than doing it all by manually entering the data).
I am still hoping that the QFX file I that is available from the Holding page of the bank actually can be downloaded directly into the investment account. I just opened it with Notepad and find that other than the mystery “sample security” that is the only item downloaded (listed at the very end), it actually contains CASHBALANCE, MARGINBALANCE, SECNAME, TICKER, UNITS, UNITPRICE, MKTVAL, but no interest charges, divident payments or reinvestments or other cash transactions.
Does the OFX format not include cash transactions?
I just called the broker TD Direct Investing, and they have no information at all on any of this.
Thanks
92 Posted by dwg on 04 Mar, 2021 07:46 PM
If you are going to cut and paste data you might as well just load the CSV file into a spreadsheet program and do it from there, it is only possible to cut and paste field by field. Banks account registers do not support all the fields that are in Investment Accounts.
Support people at a bank should either know or be able to find out about the files they make available on their website for customers to download. OFX files support all transactions, it sounds like you have downloaded a summary file rather than a transaction file. Perhaps the institution provide different files at different places in the on the site.
93 Posted by harold on 04 Mar, 2021 09:19 PM
I just found a help file in an obscure place of the site that states that TD only supports Quicken 2017 and 2018. So it seems that the new owners of Quicken are squeezing not only their customers but also the banks, and TD at least has dropped support of the current versions of Quicken.
94 Posted by olsenha on 21 Mar, 2021 04:05 PM
I can identify with many of the points in this discussion. having some 20+ years of banking and investment data from before Quicken (MSMoney anyone) and now trying to get out of Q and stay out of the cloud, MD seem the best alternative. I seem to have an upgraded version of Q 2017 that still exports QIF but doesn't work with TD bank anymore. In the past 2 years a number of mutual funds exchanged for slightly different names and ticker symbols which the Q magic handled well, but I'm looking through everything in the MD migration now, since the balances certainly don't match. At least I know where to look thanks to this thread.
I also miss the concept of a payee list, since some of them provide multiple services: How much did Verizon get altogether for TV, Internet, phone, wireless; or the local handyman company for electrical, storm repairs, etc without having to create a specially filtered report.
Personally I'd say MD still has a way to go to be as powerful and convenient as the Q, but still attractive as one of a few tools with local, not cloud based, data storage.
System closed this discussion on 20 Jun, 2021 04:10 PM.
dtd re-opened this discussion on 26 Feb, 2022 11:17 PM
95 Posted by dtd on 26 Feb, 2022 11:17 PM
Popping this discussion, as for some reason SEARCH will not find it.
96 Posted by davidvernonlong on 27 Feb, 2022 10:50 AM
Hi,
As there is no payee list you could try using " tags " to collect together
payee information.
Davud
From: dtd <[email blocked]>
Sent: Saturday, 26 February, 2022 11:18 PM
To: [email blocked]
Subject: Re: The Vicissitudes of Quicken to Moneydance [Switching to
Moneydance #15012]
System closed this discussion on 29 May, 2022 11:00 AM.
dtd re-opened this discussion on 08 Sep, 2022 07:53 PM
97 Posted by dtd on 08 Sep, 2022 07:53 PM
Popping this again, as an interested user is pursuing this exact issue, and I hope to provide an answer here versus in their thread.
98 Posted by dtd on 08 Sep, 2022 08:02 PM
I found this thread from Nov 2019 (about when this thread was created) that is extremely useful. As I am not the originator, I cannot reopen it, but I can link to it:
https://infinitekind.tenderapp.com/discussions/problems/57338-notes-on-importing-25-years-of-complex-quicken-data
Another good one about the vicissitudes:
https://infinitekind.tenderapp.com/discussions/switching-from-another-personal-finance-program/16455-importing-files
99 Posted by dtd on 08 Sep, 2022 10:59 PM
Copied from a newer thread:
Ok, here goes, while I'm in the mood. Realize all of this is from my 3 year old memory, so I'm willing to edit when called out.
1) Extract to one QIF file with everything checked. Import to a new MD File. Note what works, and what does not. Banks/credit cards should basically work, investment accounts should have all security values correct (though current stock value may be wrong - Quote Loader can help there). Balances for all accounts could be very crazy.
You may find the existence of many ACCOUNTX accounts, some of which may have one entry, some many.
You can stop here by changing the initial balance to an arbitrary value that causes each account to have the correct value for TODAY. Hide the ACCOUNTX accounts. This SHOULD give you something you could work with, but some will want to go further. If you do not have something you MIGHT work with, there may be a different problem.
2. Start to fix things (I did it in Quicken). This is an ITERATIVE process. I imported QIF exports many times to observe what I'd improved and what I had not.
ACCOUNTX: If one entry - go fix the entry in Quicken, if many - well, maybe make a category (CAR-Change in Asset Value) and point the transaction to that versus to the account itself.
Cash Balance Issues between investments/banks - XIN/XOUT is your friend. Find where this happens and understand the action is probably not supported outside of Quicken. Quicken DOES allow batch changes to Action Types (MD does not). Change all BLAHBLAH actions to something like XIN/XOUT or some other type MD recognizes.
Investment account cash balances - Whatever makes BUYXFER/SELLXFR from Quicken in MD doesn't work. Change to BUY/SELL in Quicken or something that works. (I don't remember them all after 3 years)
Do this iteratively and see the cash balances at least improve.
IRA Accounts. I pray you don't have to deal with this, so I will leave it alone for now.
The two primary things that have to be fixed are ACCOUNTX items and Daily cash balances. Again - there are ways to leave them alone (hide accountx, and live with historical cash balances)
That's at least a start on a process article. Going to get dinner
System closed this discussion on 08 Dec, 2022 11:00 PM.
dtd re-opened this discussion on 14 Dec, 2022 11:38 PM
100 Posted by dtd on 14 Dec, 2022 11:38 PM
Anyone who has taken the time to check this long thread out - I am in a sense passing on the baton to someone who would like to condense it and make it more usable (since it is currently way too long). I have done some of the condensing near the end of the thread, but I don't plan to personally take it further, other than mentioning some import concepts elsewhere to those in need of help.
I look forward to someone to bring this all together "after the fact", since most was created (with dwg and derrekkent23 helping me out) as I learned it.
101 Posted by dtd on 14 Dec, 2022 11:49 PM
If I were "that person", I'd start with the derrekkent23 post that is posted about preparing the QIF file and so on....
https://infinitekind.tenderapp.com/discussions/switching-from-another-personal-finance-program/21672-how-do-i-incorporate-old-quicken-files#comment_55919792
Then I'd point to post 66 here
https://infinitekind.tenderapp.com/discussions/switching-from-another-personal-finance-program/15012-the-vicissitudes-of-quicken-to-moneydance/page/3#comment_48074651
Then I'd edit in post 99 and 98 in some fashion [just scroll up]
There would be more to do, but that might get some folks to have at least a working data set in MD and they could decide if they even needed to go further (like me).
System closed this discussion on 15 Mar, 2023 11:50 PM.
dtd re-opened this discussion on 05 Aug, 2024 08:39 PM
102 Posted by dtd on 05 Aug, 2024 08:39 PM
Resurrecting the dead, as a couple of new conversion attempts are occurring and they may wish to post here.
System closed this discussion on 04 Nov, 2024 08:40 PM.