Kudos on the Quicken R3 Converasion Utility
John Gallagher
like to thank the folks at Quicken (and Microsoft) for coming up with a
great conversion utility. I know I'm likely to get flamed for this - but
hear me out.
I ran the conversion on a Money file that goes back to 2000 (and before for
some investment accounts). I, like many, had an imperfect conversion.
Numerous records were dropped. However, I inspected the items dropped and
found an important fact: I had used these transactions incorrectly. All were
cases where Money allowed me to create a transaction in an investment
account that should have been in the associated cash account. They were
dropped - correctly - by the conversion utility due to their lack of a
related security. Once I corrected these items in Money - a not too trivial
task as I had repeated this mistake many times - the conversion program ran
with zero errors.
I learned an important lesson: before you criticize make sure it is not your
own fault. I am sure many folks have made similar mistakes or created
kludges to get something to work. Don't expect the utility to read your
mind - it simply follows the (Quicken) rules.
Let's give credit where credit is due. I am sure there will be other cases
down the road where criticism will be justified.
JohnG
JDelMar
determine fault on the errors, I'm less than thrilled with a 102 page
error log, with no way to get to the real problems without going
through the entire thing page by page. There are hundreds of
truncated memo fields that I'd just like to ignore all at once, but
there is no way to sort the thing, no way to get rid of the minor
stuff, etc, etc. It looks very pretty in HTML, but no thought was
given to how it might get used in real life.
And the worst is that there are a substantial number of transactions
that do need to be fixed, and after I do that I'll still have an error
log that is 80 or 90 pages which I once again will have to peruse
carefully to make sure I got all the important problems.
What a PIA.
J
PhilS
splits correctly, but I was able to manually correct this in Quicken. Most
of the bill pay reminders were corrected. All my accounts matched to the
penny. So I'm now using Quicken 2010 exclusively.
Phil S
"John Gallagher" <jgalla...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:e02dQHta...@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...
---Fitz---
"Ed Hansberry, MS-MVP/Mobile Devices"
<spamfree-...@hotmail.spambegone.com> wrote in message
news:7duqg5p4uvd0q3p8c...@4ax.com...
> a month ago but never installed it after hearing of the improved
> R3 converter. I have used every version of Money from Money 95
> and have a 68MB file to convert. Hoping R3 works well. Plant to
> test it this weekend.
> --
> __________________________________________________________________________________
> Ed Hansberry (Please do *NOT* email me. Post here for the benefit of all)
> What is on my Pocket PC? http://www.ehansberry.com/
> Microsoft MVP - Mobile Devices www.pocketpc.com
> What is an MVP? - http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
I picked up Q2010 Premier recently and I'm also pleased with the converter.
It
didn't get everything right but it went fairly easy. I imported 4 different
data files and the first three went fine. The last file was just over 45MB
with
data back to 1977. It would not import. It had 23 open accounts and
probably 30 closed accounts. I deleted the closed accounts which
reduced the file size to just over 39MB and then all went well.
There is a bit of a learning curve to Quicken and so far I'm disappointed in
the Reports. Several things got a little screwed up in the import: 2 loan
accounts for loans I made to some one else became loans I took out. One
scheduled bill reminder for paying a bill turned into a deposit. In my
brokerage accounts, when Money added shares because of account name
changes etc., Quicken showed the correct amounts in the Portfolio but
insisted on adjusting the totals when I downloaded updates. After deleting
the additions, Q now leaves the positions alone and shows the correct number
of shares. A few other oddities but nothing of great significance. Most of
my
time has been spent learning the interface.
Ken
with 27 pages of "errors". Quicken via their Quicken Live Community Forum
said wait two weeks and R3 will fix the problems. Much to my surprise I
converted again over Thanksgiving and got 3 errors all of which were my
fault in Money. I did have one problem with an Option transaction that R3
should have kicked but converted. For some reason only part of Quicken
handled the transaction correctly which caused the Portfolio to disagree
with the Accounts view. I posted my problem with Quicken Support along with
a screen dump and again, much to my surprise, Quicken Support got back to me
via the PHONE and resolved the issue in less that 10 minutes. Now all I
have to do is learn to like the Quicken GUI etc. The lack of Options
support will probably be a major issue for me down the road. I know I'm
very biased at this point since I've used Money since day one and I'm not
sure if I will never forgive Microsoft for walking away from a very good
program. However, it looks like Intuit is trying to make us former Money
users happy.
"John Gallagher" <jgalla...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:e02dQHta...@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...
Bowler@discussions.microsoft.com John Bowler
> I picked up Q2010 Premier recently and I'm also pleased with the converter.
> It
> didn't get everything right but it went fairly easy.
> In my
> brokerage accounts, when Money added shares because of account name
> changes etc., Quicken showed the correct amounts in the Portfolio but
> insisted on adjusting the totals when I downloaded updates. After deleting
> the additions, Q now leaves the positions alone and shows the correct number
> of shares. A few other oddities but nothing of great significance.
My experiences were similar - my 50MByte data file dates back to the end of
1996.
The one serious error was in equity positions. On shares I bought before a
stock split then had to move to a different account after the split the
amount in the transfer was incorrect - derived from the pre-split share
count. I had to fix these manually.
On the other hand the HP/Agilent/Verigy spin offs were very hard to manage
in Money; the original HP share basic got split between Agilent and HP then
split again between Verigy and Agilent. I'd given up on getting this right
in Money because of insufficient precision in stock splits. With Quicken I
was able to get the shares right so that the basis is correct. All the same
I still use Excel for my tax calculations: I can see all the numbers there!
At the end of the day checking basis and share count against my Excel and
Money numbers confirmed that I've got everything right now in Quicken so far
as equities go. That makes me somewhat satisified, though I'm still
distressed by the learning curve. It took several weeks before I noticed
those tabs that appear at the bottom of the screen to help resolve downloaded
transactions.
John Bowler <jbo...@acm.org>