A User's Experience of Intuit Quicken to Microsoft Money Conversion (Part 2)
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.
Back to Part 1
7) In Quicken, stock splits/consolidations show up as transactions in the investment
account and so are easy to spot. Pre-split transactions have the amounts of shares
shown pre-split. Money handles this differently. The only place where I can see
the split being recorded is in the price history. Also, in Money all the transactions
whether post- or pre-split are shown in post-split terms. Not a major issue but
something to look out for.
8) With Quicken, I would sometimes put in negative commission amounts for a transaction
in order to 'slop up' any rounding errors where total cost != share price x no.of
shares. Money doesn't seem to like negative commissions - it breaks up the transaction
into two separate ones with a 'QUICKEN: modified transaction' in the memo field.
9) This is a big one. The Quicken->Money conversion doesn't seem to handle transactions
well prior to around Mar97. Before this date, most of my transactions in all types
of accounts had a bogus cheque number of '32' inserted. This affected a few thousand
of transactions for me. Luckily, find-and-replace works reasonably well for this
one. Do <CTRL-H> -> Advanced Search, select which accounts you need and
under the 'details' tab, set 'find this cheque number' to 32 and then replace ->
replace all transactions found. Check the transactions are ones you want to change
and then change 'Payee' to 'Number' and 'With' to blank and hit 'next'.
10) Apart from cheque number 32, I had also had a few bogus cheque numbers 116,
97 scattered around on old transactions. Fortunately, there weren't too many of
these and I could do these individually.
11) Perhaps the one that took most time for me was reconciliation. The problem was
that transactions in Quicken that have been reconciled turn up as unreconciled in
Money (usually when these transactions are older than a couple of years). This meant
checking reconciled balances in Quicken & Money and trying to tie them both
together. Occasionally, I also found the opposite problem - unreconciled transactions
become reconciled after conversion. This is even worse since you need to manually
change these transactions to unreconciled and then mess with the starting balance
in the reconciliation to make things match.
12) The final niggle is that the payee field in Money is shorter than the Quicken
and so payee names get truncated after conversion. Not much can be done about this
that I can see.
After all this, everything tied up between my Quicken & Money files: balances,
transaction histories, investment amounts, price histories etc. Up till now, I'd
been using the Money Trial Version so, now that everything was cleared up, I decided
to buy the Full version. Did the install and then couldn't get into the Money file
I'd spent so much time on - almost tore my hair out at this point!! Luckily, I saw
the post on this forum by Cal Learner on 26Jan05 ('money trial to paid for version')
and this solved the problem for me. (See FAQ Article
35)
As you can see, the conversion has been far from painless but, I do now have a fully
usable finance package again. I can't say that that I prefer Money to Quicken right
now as I was very used to using Quicken, but perhaps Money will grow on me. The
one thing I have to say is that the responses on this forum from MVPs (FAQ
Article 7) and others have been very, very useful. This is something I didn't
have with Quicken. I don't think I could have done the conversion without looking
back on posts here to work through issues.
Back to Part 1 Return to Articles Page
Thanks to Harprit for allowing me to republish his words to the
newsgroup here.