[moneydance] Quicken comparison so far

[Edward Reid]

At 3/9/2009 01:04 AM -0400, Dal Pal \(NSM\) wrote:
>I imported my 26+ MB Quicken file only once into Moneydance without 
>too many problems. Went fast and smooth. Accounts came across okay 
>but had to do some clean up in transactions.

That's the general experience. I tried to move from Q/Mac to Q/Win, 
but found that MD did a far better job of importing from Q/Mac than 
Q/Win did. (Q/Mac and Q/Win are entirely different programs -- no 
cross-platform compatibility.)

>1. Even tho I bought 1 whole share of stock and took delivery on 1 
>whole share of stock the next month, Moneydance said I was either 
>.0001 share +/- in that account.

You are likely to have rounding issues when dealing with stock. If 
you look at an investment account statement or even (I think) a 
single transaction, you may find that they don't balance entirely in 
the fractional cents.

Now, one share ... I don't see how that could go wrong unless the 
share price involved fractional cents, or currency conversion. 
However, remember that in investments, you balance shares, not 
dollars. If you have to put in a fake fee of +/- one or two cents to 
make the shares balance, just do it. The dollar amount shown is just 
derived from multiplying the share price (entered manually or 
downloaded from Yahoo) by the number of shares.

People who do a lot of investing usually say that a specialized 
investment program is worth using. For my situation, that's overkill 
-- I don't even care about the long/short term capital gains issue 
because the two mutual funds I own are both in my IRA.

>1. Printed Moneydance account list to compare to open Quicken 
>account list. Zero balance accounts were missing so I printed 
>Quicken account list to compare to Moneydance.

I don't remember having this problem, but possibly there's an option 
in the Quicken export to skip zero-balance accounts. I would guess 
that the problem is on Quicken export rather than MD import.

>2. Quicken account balances are totals of all transactions in the 
>account even if they are after the current date. Moneydance account 
>balances are totals only thru current date! YEAH!

Note that if you click on the Balance column heading, you have the 
choice of Balance [final], Current Balance, or Cleared Balance.

There are several non-obvious click spots in MD -- another is to 
click on Upcoming Items under Reminders to deal with a scheduled 
transaction (Reminder in MD jargon) before it appears in the home page list.

>3. All my current investment accounts have the correct number of 
>shares but amounts are off.

See above -- number of shares is what's important. When you reconcile 
statements, reconcile the share amounts, not the dollar amounts.

>Or maybe Moneydance updates prices each time it's opened?

You want the Stock Quote Synchronizer extension, which downloads 
stock prices from Yahoo and puts them in your account.

>4. No page numbers on Moneydance reports? ;(

Reporting is far and away the roughest edge of MD.

>7. I have accounts that I record back into itself. I know, not the 
>greatest thing to do, but they are just tracking an amount. 
>Moneydance created a new category with the account name followed by 
>an "X". Works for me!

You can probably move the transactions and delete the X accounts. The 
X accounts generally arise during import from the fact that QIF files 
are basically incomplete -- transactions are all one-sided, and the 
importing program has to figure out how to match up the two sides. 
When MD can't match the sides, it creates the X account. I had about 
50 of them after import, but a couple of hours of work eliminated all 
but a couple which required more investigation.

At that time (3 years ago), MD also created X accounts whenever 
accounts had an initial balance. I suggested that this could be 
improved; I don't know whether my suggestion was implemented (since 
of course I haven't needed to repeat the import).

However, I see that MD prevents you from entering self-referencing 
transactions, so this doesn't really address your issue. I could not 
find any way around this.

>2. Would be nice if HELP had PREVIOUS and NEXT buttons so we don't 
>have to keep going back and forth between HELP and information or 
>EXPAND & COLLAPSE capabilities within the TOC. But I suppose once 
>I'm comfortable with Moneydance, I won't be needing it much so 
>spending programming time on this would be a waste.

Documentation is another generally rough edge of MD, though not as 
rough as reporting.

Edward

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