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Switching to MoneyDance From Quicken Created Duplicate Accounts on QIF Import

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crokett

14 Sep, 2025 12:15 AM

I am evaluating MoneyDance as a replacement for Quicken to get something that is more transportable across operating systems. I exported a QIF file from Quicken for all of my accounts going back two years to do some testing. When the file was imported into MoneyDance, it created duplicate accounts such as Checking and CheckingX. I have done some research but the explanations so far don't seem to fit what I see. For instance there a are a lot of mentions of this happening because MoneyDance is creating dummy accounts, and one of the accounts having 0 transactions. I have transactions in each account (not duplicates as near as I can tell) and comparing these to Quicken, I can find transactions from each of the accounts in Quicken.

\ What is the way forward to fix this? Move all the transactions from one of the accounts to the other? After that do I start correcting account balances, etc? Is it easer to just start with an empty file? I would prefer not to do this as I do not want to have to maintain Quicken for access to the old data if I move to MoneyDance

1. 1 Posted by dtd on 14 Sep, 2025 12:29 AM

   

   The reason you get ACCOUNTX accounts is you have transactions that have ACCOUNT as the category. In double entry accounting this is a big no, as you are simply creating or destroying money.

   Quicken allows this as they dont mind being loosy goosy and betraying accounting rules. To fix the transactions, MD creates a different account so that the transaction amount goes somewhere versus vanishing.

   One way to "fix" this is to fix the transactions that reference the same account. One thing people often do is depreciate an item by just putting in entries that vanish part of the value versus creating a category called Item depreciation and using that.

   so you can fix this in quicken and export again, or examine the X accounts and see what categories you should create as a substitute for what quicken let you do improperly.

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2. 2 Posted by dwg on 14 Sep, 2025 12:37 AM

   

   A common use we see of this with Quicken is for initial balances where Quicken just draws on the account itself for the initial balance. It is a totally inappropriate thing to do. It just makes Money appear from nowhere.

   They use the same process to just make money disappear.

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3. 3 Posted by dwg on 14 Sep, 2025 12:51 AM

   

   Many of us have migrated from Quicken and have had to deal with what you are now. The Moneydance importer will do what it has to in order to ensure that double entry accounting rules are complied with, the software is based on these rules so there is no choice in this.

   With the transactions that generate these extra accounts the software has insufficient information to make any sort of determination of if the Money should come from another account, be an initial balance or come from a category, hence it just uses the AccountX method, it only knows the account name the transaction is in.

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4. 4 Posted by crokett on 14 Sep, 2025 03:56 PM

   

   Thanks. For my main checking account. MoneyDance created a "Checking" and "CheckingX". I think I understand what you are saying. Picking on 1 transaction that is a mortgage payment, it shows up in Checking with a category of CheckingX and in Checking X with a category of Checking. In Quicken the same transaction has a category of [Checking]. Other mortgage payments listed with category of "Transfer" or ideally the account that represents the mortgage show up in the correct Checking account in MoneyDance. Some credit card payments are similar.

   I will think about what way is easier to fix it. I think the most correct way is to fix it in Quicken, then do the export and try again.

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5. System closed this discussion on 14 Dec, 2025 04:00 PM.