A User's Experience of an Intuit Quicken to Microsoft Money Conversion

The following is a slightly edited account of a user converting from Intuit Quicken to Microsoft Money. Thanks to Harprit for allowing me to publish it here.

There are a few tips that I've picked up along the way that might be useful for other people. Some of these may have been repeated in other threads so apologies if there are duplications. First thing to do is backup your Quicken file. As you'll see, I had to do the conversion several times so a good backup is vital. Here goes for the rest:

1) First problem was the one other people have seen that I couldn't open the Money file after conversion since it complained about custom currencies. Changed my default currency in Quicken from 'Pound' to 'British Pound' and reconverted and all was fine - see also FAQ Article 38.

2) The transaction category disappeared on hundreds of transactions after conversion. I believe this is due to Quicken having categories that overlap with those in Money. For instance, I have an 'Education' category in Quicken and, after conversion, all transactions with this category were now uncategorised. Resolved this by going back to the Quicken file and renaming 'Education' to 'Educate' and then running the conversion again. The transactions now show up properly in Money. Had to do this with several categories.

3) Even after step 2), some transactions (only a few in my case) still show up as uncategorised. Check by looking at 'Reports->Spending by Category->All Dates' and assign categories to currently unassigned.

4) A large number of transactions show up with 'QUICKEN: modified transaction'. Most of these are transfers to investment accounts but not exclusively. Do a search for this text and check. I found most of these to be innocuous and the transaction was actually correct in Money.

5) A couple of investment account issues. The first one is the most common one other people have seen. All my investment accounts came across to Money as 'managed fund' even though they were correctly labelled as 'unit/inv trust' or 'share' in Quicken. None of these were associated with a custom account type in Quicken (as has been claimed by others on this newsgroup). The only 'solution' I've seen is to create another investment of the required type in Money and move all the transactions from one investment to the other.

I tried this and didn't go for it for 2 reasons. The first is it would be very laborious for me. The second (and more important) one was that I lost all my price history for that investment by doing this. So, for now, I'm living with one investment type for all my investments. The limitation within Money to not be able to change investment type once the investment is set up seems like a severe one to me.

6) A weird problem hit me as I also have a separate Quicken file which only has investment accounts in it. After the conversion, I went into the converted Money file and all seemed fine. Then I exited Money and tried to go back in and it complains about not having a banking account and wouldn't let me open up the Money file at all. Did this conversion several times so it's definitely a problem. Resolved this by doing the conversion one more time and then setting up a dummy banking account before shutting down for the first time. Then was able to go back into the file after exiting.

Forward to Part 2

Thanks to Harprit for allowing me to republish his words to the newsgroup here.