[moneydance] help with setup

[Edward Reid]

Finances are never intuitive. ;-)

Some of your questions have already been answered well. One thing to note 
is that moving data via QIF will almost always introduce errors. That's 
because the QIF format is basically incomplete -- it only has single-sided 
transactions, and it's up to the importing program to guess how to match 
them. MD actually imports QIF files from Quicken much better than Quicken 
itself does. I can't speak for MoneyPlus, with which I have no experience.

When you have an account open, you can edit the account, including the 
initial balance. MD tends to do the import by creating a fictitious account 
and a transfer from it -- at least it did a couple of years ago, and from 
what others are saying, it sounds like this has not changed. I'm not sure 
why Sean hasn't fixed this, because probably 90% of the time it could 
figure out that it just needs an initial balance. But I went through all 
those fictitious accounts, got rid of them, and put the amount of that one 
transaction into the initial balance for the real account.

Creating a "black hole", or "balance adjustment", account (or category, 
which is pretty much the same thing in MD) is something that most people 
have to do eventually. Some accounts just aren't worth the trouble of 
balancing down to the last cent, or you don't keep up with an account for a 
while and want to bring it back into balance without altering the initial 
balance and thus affecting the old records. Getting money from, or sending 
it to, the balance adjustment account is the way we do this.

Edward
-- 
Art works by Melynda Reid: http://paleo.org