Recently active topics in The Infinite Kind about Moneydance

After a couple of my negative posts knocking the new forum's home and the Moneydance user manual, I feel it's only fair to give a bit of praise where praise is due.

I've been trying to move away from Quicken 2002 for ages, particularly since Intuit dumped the UK user base without a moment's notice. I've tried a number of alternatives, but haven't found anything that really suited my needs. At all costs I wanted to avoid locking my data away in some software writer's black box only to find later that the software was no longer being supported, the data file was in some proprietary format, or that I was unable to easily transfer my valuable data elsewhere.

In particular it was a fundamental requirement that I could carry across around 20-years worth of Quicken data into whatever new package I elected to use.

Despite lots of posts all over the place about the problems of importing QIF data, Moneydance has done a TREMENDOUS job. It took me just a few hours to get the whole job done from start to finish..

I have to say that the manual didn't help much - and it could easily have helped a great deal more. Fortunately there are quite a few posts in various Quicken support resources along with those in the old Moneydance forum
http://moneydance.com/forum/YaBB.pl that provide a bit of additional information about how it's possible to help the import process along.

I imported just the account information first and then set-up the categories to exactly match what was in my Quicken export. I then imported all the account transactions is one go from a single file - that worked reasonably well with only a few (less than 30) transactions that needed to be edited.

By looking at an account with relatively few transactions it was easy to see that most of the problems were caused by DivX transactions being duplicated as Xfr transactions. Correcting this problem was then a trivial task.

In all I had seven or eight thousand transactions in the imported data. It took me just a couple of hours to figure out what was causing the problems and to correct them. Having done that, all but twelve of my 48 accounts balanced to the penny. The remaining accounts, all of which were investment accounts involving stock holdings, all balanced in terms of their cash content. The only discrepancies were caused by differences in the way in which Quicken and Moneydance download current stock prices - Quicken uses the last price in the price history, while Moneydance uses the 'current' price (which may not be exactly the same as the last entry in the price history).

The whole job has taken about a day and a half, but the majority of that time was spent checking that Moneydance tallied exactly with Quicken in respect of account balances, the stock portfolio of each account, the number of shares in each stock holding, the prices downloaded for each share, etc.

I'm now planning to run Moneydance in parallel with Quicken for a month or two until I'm entirely happy to dump Quicken for good.

So thanks, Sean, for a really good product. Moneydance succeeded in making sense of my Quicken data where several of your competitors failed miserably.

You just need to get the manual sorted out.... ;-)

Mike