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Totally invalid balances

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Chris Hill

Feb 26, 2022 @ 06:04 PM

HI

I am looking at converting mu Quicken account, based on QW 2004, to Moneydance. The file is large and has up to 50 years of records, including both bank, credit and investments.

So I got QW to produce a QIF file for all of the various accounts and all of the other information that it can export. The resulting file is nearly 900,000 records long.

So I imported that into MD, with no errors, and started checking the result. DISASTER - my QW system says that my current bank account has a value of £22,401.75; MD thinks that it is £13,347.13; and my bank thinks that it is £22,334.12. The bank is correct, QW will be when I do a balance to find what I have missed. BUT why is MD so wrong.

After downloading all of the transactions for my current account from both QW and MD, I started looking for differences through 9500 transactions. Then, after a couple of hours, I found this set of errors regarding a transfer of £63.98 from my current account to my French France cash account as 500FFr.

These are the QIF records, which seem to be good.

!Type:Bank
D1/12/92
U0.00
T0.00
CX
POpening Balance
L[FD Current]
^

D17/6/94
U-40.00
T-40.00
CX
NCash
LCash
^
D17/6/94
U-25.75
T-25.75
CX
NSwitc
PTesco - Banbury
LGroceries
^
D17/6/94
U-63.98
T-63.98
CX
N100117
PThomas Cook
M160 Dutch Gulder
L[French Franc]
^
D17/6/94
U-73.02
T-73.02
CX
N100118
L[FD Visa]
^

!Type:CCard
D1/12/92
U0.00
T0.00
CX
POpening Balance
L[FD Visa]
^

D17/6/94
U73.02
T73.02
CX
L[FD Current]
^

!Type:Cash
D1/1/74
U0.00
T0.00
POpening Balance
L[French Franc]
^

D17/6/94
U500.00
T500.00
PThomas Cook
M500 FFr
L[FD Current]
^

Attached files show the equivalent transactions in QW and MD. It appears that you have correctly debited my current account by 63.98 and credited my French account by 500FFr. HOWEVER, you have also debited my current account by £500 and have credited my French account by 63.98FFr.

Given that I have many currency transfers, as well as multiple investment accounts, all of which are, with a few exceptions, validly balanced in QW. I was hoping, given that I am planning to rebuild my PC which might stop QW from working, I was hoping that you would be able to take this task.

But I need to be 100% sure that this can be done.

Regards

Chris

• QW_1994_06_17_FD_Current.JPG 31.7 KB
• QW_1994_06_17_French_Franc.JPG 13 KB
• MD_1994_06_17_FD_Current.JPG 42.3 KB
• MD_1994_06_17_French_Franc.JPG 22 KB

1. 1 Posted by dtd on Feb 26, 2022 @ 11:24 PM

   

   just a user...

   I had the same issue (with 35+ years of data) when I converted a year or two ago.

   The primary issues for me were balances and investment account balances particularly. I can't address currency issues as I used only US Dollars (at that time).

   The bottom line is that MD (as far as I could tell) properly imports transactions (maybe not currency), and also gets securities in properly, but the balances are totally wonky for multiple reasons (maybe add your currency issues as another reason).

   Another bottom line - if your security values are correct, and you don't mind having totally irrelevant balances for the last 35-50 years, you can "make it ok", by setting the initial balance to an artificial value to make the current date value correct, then just live with it.

   I couldn't do that as I just couldn't live with that scenario, and took the hard way. I analyzed what MD did wrong in the import (and still does wrong) - a big one is improper import of non-recognized actions from Quicken - and fixed those transactions. I did most of that IN Quicken, but IF you have an interest in a VERY VERY VERY long discussion mostly between me and @dwg, you can check out the thread "The Vicissitudes of Quicken to Moneydance" (I'd start about in the middle, as the beginning was mostly questions like you are asking)

   Another issue you may run into is the creation of ACCOUNTX items if you used quicken to create or destroy money. Those aren't that hard to fix.

   Overall, I spent about 80 hours (over about 8 weeks) to FIX it all versus taking the easy "change balances at the start and live with stupid balances over the years".

   Good luck - it CAN be done, and I'm glad I did it, but it was a frustrating and time consuming process - especially with investment accounts. (And maybe in your case, currency issues).

   [I just popped the vicissitudes thread as for some reason MD search couldn't find it, even with me being the original author.]

   Here is the SIMPLE solution that I wrote to allow someone to simply get the data in and start using Moneydance from conversion date forward, and having the historical data available as history. I did not use that solution.

   https://infinitekind.tenderapp.com/discussions/switching-from-another-personal-finance-program/15012-the-vicissitudes-of-quicken-to-moneydance/page/3#comment_48074651

   • Edit

2. 2 Posted by dwg on Feb 27, 2022 @ 12:20 AM

   

   I'm a fellow user.

   With Bank and credit card type accounts the most common issue is that the Quicken transfer file did not include any opening balances for the accounts. This is an easy fix as the account info screen in Moneydance has provision for you to enter an opening balance.

   Investment accounts can have a range of issues, there is no one thing that can be highlighted, it is more a case with these type of accounts to identify the problem(s) and work out a solution. A range of solutions have been developed for specific problems but there is no consolidated document on these.

   Currency problems are tricky. QIF files have no provision for currency in them. With pre-planning, before you start the migration, they can be addressed to a large degree. It requires you to preload exchange rates into Moneydance, ideally extracted from Quicken, then before loading any transactions the correct currency needs to be set for each account.

   • Edit

3. System closed this discussion on May 29, 2022 @ 12:30 AM.