Tim's dashboard

Thanks; I had the same question and see it's been answered.

I just read in another thread about an idea that might solve the problem. As I record each transaction, I'm now replacing the long cryptic Payee names with something simpler. Example, when I download a transaction to Walmart, it shows up with something like: "Wal-mart 1129 Austin Nw", so I'm replacing that with just "Walmart" by typing it into the payee field before recording.

In the future, transacations to "Wal-mart 1129 Austin Nw" seem to get automatically replaced with "Walmart". It seems like the random problem might be slowly decreasing, but we'll see. It's possible that once all these nicknames are assigned, the problem will go away.

I have this exact problem, and it's really inconvenient. It must be a bug.

Yes, I should have mentioned that I figured out a way around it, and I long ago completed my conversion successfully. I had to do a fair amount of manual work, because I think a long time ago, I had done some sort of archive on Quicken, so that some of the links on Quicken were broken for that reason, so it converted messily. The balances were sometimes incorrect, so after conversion, and when through manually and found the offending trasactions causing the incorrect balances, and then created correcting entries to offset the errors.

I've also just done my taxes for the first time with the Moneydance software's assistance (i.e. its reports), and was successful in it.

Thanks for that advice. It works just like you say, and I don't know why I couldn't figure this out before. Maybe the example I had at the time involve a parent like you describe, so I'll keep that part of your answer in mind as well. I'm starting to be happy with Moneydance these last couple of days, as my problems are getting resolved, so I'm 90% sure I'll wind up registering my trial version. – Tim, on February 18, 2009 04:55

Thanks for your answers. Per my most recent comment, I was considering a workaround to the reporting problem by doing an export and writing some of my own code to use that export file, but now I don't think even that is possible, because after reading around, it sounds like the QIF export from Moneydance doesn't have detailed enough info in there for me to do this.

Furthermore, Quicken 2006 no longer supports importing a QIF file from Moneydance, so it's not like I can use Quicken to generate my report, so unless Moneydance 2009 adds short vs long term gains, I see no way for me to do the report automatically.

But here's an idea, which is cumbersome but doable. (In my case, it's only doable because I always specify lots on my taxable securities.) When I do my taxes for a particular year, I could go to all my sells for the year, and go into securities view for each security involved. Then click on Edit lots, and on the left side highlight the sell transaction and copy and paste to Excel or Access. Then go to the right side and individually copy and paste each lot associated with the sell to a different part of Excel, or a different table in Access. A separate copy/paste for each lot.

Then repeat this process for each sell transaction. Once all this is done, I now have complete records outside Moneydance, and into my own custom app, where I can generate my own report. I could separate long term vs short term, and even have detailed gains/loss by lot. As a cross check to ensure I didn't miss any copies/pastes, I can compare the grand total capital gain/loss in MoneyDance's report to the what my own detailed report says.

So yes, this is certainly a workable workaround, and is the only one I can think of. It sounds cumbersome and makes me wonder why I'm abandoning Quicken and going to Moneydance, but there are other things I'm liking about Moneydance that's steering me towards registering my trial copy of Moneydance. Hopefully as time goes on, future editions of Moneydance will get better, and if I understand correctly, we get access to free upgrades to future editions. – Tim, on February 17, 2009 05:35

As a workaround to the lack of reporting like I need it, I wonder if there's a way to export investment sales to a text file, including lot info, so that I could write a VB routing in MS Access to do my own reporting. (I'm pretty proficient at MS Access, as well as VB.) – Tim, on February 16, 2009 20:24