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Moneydance QIF export format is missing data
It looks as though the Moneydance QIF export misses out important data when compared with the Quicken equivalent.
As part of my (somewhat extended) evaluation of Moneydance, I've been looking at the structure and data content of the Moneydance QIF data export.
One of the reasons for moving from Quicken to Moneydance is my desire to have my data in an easily-accessible format, rather than have it locked away in some proprietary binary form. Moneydance offers this in as much as it provides the ability to export in xml and tab-delimited format. However, both these formats (especially xml) would require considerable tweaking before the data would be ready for use in another personal finance application. For this reason, I wanted to see what Moneydance's QIF export looked like.
As far as I can see, some of the required investment data is missing.
First, Moneydance doesn't export historic stock prices. Quicken, on the other hand, does support stock price export.
Second, the Moneydance QIF data for stock purchases and sales seems incomplete. Whereas Quicken's equivalent transaction includes the buy price and the share quantity, Moneydance's QIF export seems to exclude both and, instead, just contains the total cost and the fees. It is therefore not possible to tell the difference between a purchase of 1000 shares at 1 dollar each, and a single share purchase for 1000 dollars. I fail to see how a Moneydance QIF export would enable the reconstruction a full share purchase and sale history from the data it includes.
The short version of this post is that if, like me, you'd assumed that Moneydance's support for QIF would allow you to move your full Moneydance data to another application, you need to think again.
If someone has successfully used a Moneydance QIF export to fully restore their investment data, I'd be very glad to be corrected but, for the moment, it appears that the Moneydance QIF export should not be trusted.
As part of my (somewhat extended) evaluation of Moneydance, I've been looking at the structure and data content of the Moneydance QIF data export.
One of the reasons for moving from Quicken to Moneydance is my desire to have my data in an easily-accessible format, rather than have it locked away in some proprietary binary form. Moneydance offers this in as much as it provides the ability to export in xml and tab-delimited format. However, both these formats (especially xml) would require considerable tweaking before the data would be ready for use in another personal finance application. For this reason, I wanted to see what Moneydance's QIF export looked like.
As far as I can see, some of the required investment data is missing.
First, Moneydance doesn't export historic stock prices. Quicken, on the other hand, does support stock price export.
Second, the Moneydance QIF data for stock purchases and sales seems incomplete. Whereas Quicken's equivalent transaction includes the buy price and the share quantity, Moneydance's QIF export seems to exclude both and, instead, just contains the total cost and the fees. It is therefore not possible to tell the difference between a purchase of 1000 shares at 1 dollar each, and a single share purchase for 1000 dollars. I fail to see how a Moneydance QIF export would enable the reconstruction a full share purchase and sale history from the data it includes.
The short version of this post is that if, like me, you'd assumed that Moneydance's support for QIF would allow you to move your full Moneydance data to another application, you need to think again.
If someone has successfully used a Moneydance QIF export to fully restore their investment data, I'd be very glad to be corrected but, for the moment, it appears that the Moneydance QIF export should not be trusted.
I’m hoping I'm wrong about this...
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Inappropriate?I am in the process of preparing my first tax reports since switching to Moneydance. Since MD does not yet support reports filtered by tag (when will MD 2009, which promises that feature, be coming out?), I thought there were probably two options available to me:
1) Export the data back to Quicken (which I had been using for fifteen years) and do the reports in the way I always have in the past
2) Create separate categories instead of relying on tags in MD, then generate reports in MD.
Unfortunately, I ran into trouble exporting the data from MD to Quicken. I received two messages when trying to import the .qif file into Quicken:
1) File names of some accounts are too long
2) Sub-categories of accounts are not allowed
Oddly, the accounts all appeared in Quicken, but there were no transactions in them.
Can anyone help? If not, I will have to resort to Option 2, at least until MD 2009 comes out.
I am using Mac OX 10.5.6
