[moneydance] Quicken comparison so far

[David Carlson]

Edward Reid wrote:
> 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
>
>   
Under item 7, there is a way to create a self referencing transaction by 
creating it in a different account, viewing the other side, and changing 
the account from that side.  However, this throws off the account 
balance.  In fact, if an account does not balance, this may be the 
reason why.

Dave