I have been a user of Quicken since 1994, finally (in 2006) I decided it was time to move to Money, now that Quicken has been withdrawn from the UK. I was using Quicken 2000 Deluxe and made the conversion to Money 2005. After hitting a few snags I decided to keep some notes of what was involved, but I may have missed some of the things I had to do earlier in the process. What follows is a list of the problems I had and what I did to solve them.
The first and most serious one was with my base currency, which is the British Pound. In my Quicken file it was listed as "Pound". When I tried to convert this it did not recognise my base currency and asked me what currency to use, I selected “British Pound”, it then asked me for an exchange rate. After that Money hung. I resolved this by changing the name of the currency in Quicken to "British Pound". After that I was able to convert the file without hitting this problem.
I then encountered another currency problem. At one time I used to live abroad and had a currency denominated in "Lire", the now defunct Italian currency. When I converted the file it did not recognise the currency and again asked me for a new currency to use. The Italian Lira was not in the list, so I selected Euro instead. This did not ask me for an exchange rate, so it kept the numerical amounts the same, so 1 million lira (about 400 pounds) became 1 million Euro (I wish!). To get around this I changed the currency in Quicken to "Italian Lira" and then the file converted correctly, even though this currency is not listed in the currency list.
I discovered a problem with Quicken categories which had the same name as Money categories. Any transactions that used these categories would be uncategorised after the transfer. To resolve this I added a letter Q to the end of every category I had in Quicken. This allowed me to easily see which categories were Money ones and which were Quicken ones transferred over. I was unable to do this for certain built-in categories (like _AccruedInt). More on this below.
I found that all my shares had been converted to managed funds. This had to be resolved by changing the security type in Quicken from "Share" to "Shares" and then converting the file again. Before doing this I made sure that all the symbols for all my shares and funds were correct. This is supposed to ensure that the price histories transfer correctly. I had two FTSE indices set up as managed funds in my Quicken file so that I could compare performance against indices. Money has a separate category for indices. However I was unable to find a way to transfer the FTSE indices and their price histories to Money except as managed funds; in other words I could not convert them to indices in Money.
At one time I had used the Quicken savings goal feature, this caused my affected accounts not to appear to have the same balances after conversion. I found it easiest to delete the savings goal before converting.
After conversion I had to make a number of other changes that did not transfer across. These were the following:
I had two standing orders which I had deleted some years ago re-appear in the direct-debit/standing order list. I had to delete these. I had been having problems with the standing order list in Quicken 2000 with occasionally reporting out of memory errors but seemingly updating the standing orders. I think this led to some corruption that even a super validate seemed unable to clear. Nevertheless there were only two such payments to delete, so that was OK.
More bothersome was that all my standing orders and direct debits converted to manual write cheque transactions, I had to change them all manually to be direct debits again. A similar thing happened to my automatic deposits.
Another irritation was that any standing orders that had a split were transferred incorrectly. The split details were entirely wrong, although they summed to the right amount. I had to delete the details and re-do them (fortunately there were only two or three).
I like the categorisation scheme used in Money so I decided to move all categories over to the Money scheme, with some minor tweaks. Having added the Q suffix to all my Quicken categories prior to conversion, I could easily identify the categories to re-categorise. It was then easy, if a little tedious, to move the old Quicken categories to the Money categories. Money has a nice feature which allows you to see the transactions belonging to each category to help reassign the categories, and delete any unused ones such as those that Quicken had built-in.
After a while of using Money I noticed that a number of my accounts were reporting the incorrect reconciled balances. This appeared to have to do with Quicken Savings Goals and some other transfers (mostly to investment accounts). I had a bit of a tough time getting things right again.
The first and most serious one was with my base currency, which is the British Pound. In my Quicken file it was listed as "Pound". When I tried to convert this it did not recognise my base currency and asked me what currency to use, I selected “British Pound”, it then asked me for an exchange rate. After that Money hung. I resolved this by changing the name of the currency in Quicken to "British Pound". After that I was able to convert the file without hitting this problem.
I then encountered another currency problem. At one time I used to live abroad and had a currency denominated in "Lire", the now defunct Italian currency. When I converted the file it did not recognise the currency and again asked me for a new currency to use. The Italian Lira was not in the list, so I selected Euro instead. This did not ask me for an exchange rate, so it kept the numerical amounts the same, so 1 million lira (about 400 pounds) became 1 million Euro (I wish!). To get around this I changed the currency in Quicken to "Italian Lira" and then the file converted correctly, even though this currency is not listed in the currency list.
I discovered a problem with Quicken categories which had the same name as Money categories. Any transactions that used these categories would be uncategorised after the transfer. To resolve this I added a letter Q to the end of every category I had in Quicken. This allowed me to easily see which categories were Money ones and which were Quicken ones transferred over. I was unable to do this for certain built-in categories (like _AccruedInt). More on this below.
I found that all my shares had been converted to managed funds. This had to be resolved by changing the security type in Quicken from "Share" to "Shares" and then converting the file again. Before doing this I made sure that all the symbols for all my shares and funds were correct. This is supposed to ensure that the price histories transfer correctly. I had two FTSE indices set up as managed funds in my Quicken file so that I could compare performance against indices. Money has a separate category for indices. However I was unable to find a way to transfer the FTSE indices and their price histories to Money except as managed funds; in other words I could not convert them to indices in Money.
At one time I had used the Quicken savings goal feature, this caused my affected accounts not to appear to have the same balances after conversion. I found it easiest to delete the savings goal before converting.
After conversion I had to make a number of other changes that did not transfer across. These were the following:
I had two standing orders which I had deleted some years ago re-appear in the direct-debit/standing order list. I had to delete these. I had been having problems with the standing order list in Quicken 2000 with occasionally reporting out of memory errors but seemingly updating the standing orders. I think this led to some corruption that even a super validate seemed unable to clear. Nevertheless there were only two such payments to delete, so that was OK.
More bothersome was that all my standing orders and direct debits converted to manual write cheque transactions, I had to change them all manually to be direct debits again. A similar thing happened to my automatic deposits.
Another irritation was that any standing orders that had a split were transferred incorrectly. The split details were entirely wrong, although they summed to the right amount. I had to delete the details and re-do them (fortunately there were only two or three).
I like the categorisation scheme used in Money so I decided to move all categories over to the Money scheme, with some minor tweaks. Having added the Q suffix to all my Quicken categories prior to conversion, I could easily identify the categories to re-categorise. It was then easy, if a little tedious, to move the old Quicken categories to the Money categories. Money has a nice feature which allows you to see the transactions belonging to each category to help reassign the categories, and delete any unused ones such as those that Quicken had built-in.
After a while of using Money I noticed that a number of my accounts were reporting the incorrect reconciled balances. This appeared to have to do with Quicken Savings Goals and some other transfers (mostly to investment accounts). I had a bit of a tough time getting things right again.
Rob's Old Computers 