[moneydance] QMac->MD: ---X categories?

[Edward Reid]

At 23:53 05/04/06 -0400, Scott Zahn wrote:
>To set up initial balances in each account go to
>each account and in the top menu go to Account -> Edit and enter in the
>Initial Balance for the account, then you can remove the initial balance
>transactions and get rid of the "X" account.

Yeah ... it's just that there are 57 of them. But as you say, it's only 
once, and at least I don't have to go searching like I do for the cases 
where the accounts don't even have the same balance. (Like I just said in 
another message, I'm probably going to be a whiny brat for the next few days.)

>Because internally that's how Quicken stores it.  Moneydance can't tell
>the difference between an opening balance transaction from any other
>transaction that double backs into the same account

Well ... if the Description = "Opening Balance" and the date is the 
earliest date recorded in the account (perhaps with other transactions on 
the same date), I would think that MD would be pretty safe in converting it 
to an initial balance. Any reason not? If there's no good reason not to, 
I'll enter it as a suggestion. Won't happen in time to help me, but it 
would help the product a lot.

On that note, I'll summarize how my conversion is going so far (so what 
follows is just a report, not new questions). I started out after the 
import with 12 accounts (out of about 50) with apparently different 
balances in MD vs Q:

2 -- weren't actually different at all. They had future-dated transactions 
in Q. When I actually opened the register in MD, the final balances 
matched. I haven't yet figured out how to get a report from MD showing all 
account balances as of the last transaction, but that's minor.

1 -- had future-dated transactions as above (this is my receivables 
account) and also a single messed-up past transaction that I'll have to fix.

1 -- was a case where I had an asset and a category with the same name, 
"automobile". I can't blame MD for getting confused. So I've changed the 
name of the asset in Q -- it really needed changing anyway, because that 
car died and the current automobile asset is named for the make and model 
;-) -- so when I export/import next it'll be fixed.

2 -- were cash balances in investment accounts, one exactly the negative of 
the other, which should have been zero. There was a transaction where I 
bought shares in one fund by a transfer from another fund. This ended up 
with an extra Xfr transaction. I deleted the extra transaction and the 
problem went away.

1 -- is related to the way I started recording escrow payments for my 
mortgage about a year ago. Not sure what's wrong; the credits to the escrow 
account are being doubled. But probably I just have to delete the extra 
transactions and then get the mortgage payment set up right in MD. 
Shouldn't be a big deal.

3 -- (at least) are related to the closing on my house four years ago. I 
shoe-horned the whole thing into a Q transaction with lots of splits and a 
couple of dummy accounts, but Q wasn't exactly happy with it. I'm not 
surprised at needing to redo this transaction, and doing so should fix 
those three accounts.

2 -- I haven't figured out yet. But they are my two main checking accounts, 
and as such are definitely affected by several of the other errors. I 
figure I'll fix the other errors first and then look at these if any error 
remains. I'm betting that one account will be OK; the other might have a 
few messy splits that I have to re-enter.

Loans: I see in another posting you've given me what sounds like an 
adequate workaround, so I'll be trying that.

Receivables: Turned out to have imported mostly OK. I need a plan going 
forward -- I should be able to kludge invoices and receivables in MD like I 
did Q, but a better method would be welcome.

All of which makes me feel like I'm real close now.

Edward
Art works by Melynda Reid: http://paleo.org