[moneydance] Questions

[Edward Reid]

At 15:14 09/10/06 -0400, Gary Robinson wrote:
>1) In Quicken, I could generate a balance sheet based on transactions
>up to any date. So there was no problem generating a balance sheet for
>the end of the previous year. I don't see any way to do that in MD
>using the New Worth report. Is  there a way to do it other than to make
>a copy of the data and delete all 2006 transactions?

Have you tried using the "account balances" report? I haven't used either 
one very much, but they seem to do approximately the same thing.

>2) In Quicken, my recollection is that the the Cash Flow report
>includes transactions from a bank account into asset accounts
>(representing the purchase of an asset), since  the purchase  of an
>asset is part of one's cash flow. In MD, as far as I can tell, those
>transactions are ignored in the Cash Flow report. At least I'm not
>seeing any sign of them. That means the Cash Flow report doesn't
>actually include  all cash flows. Is that right? It certainly seems to
>make that report less useful.

This does appear to me to be a problem. MD does not, AFAIK, have a clear 
way of saying what accounts should be considered "cash" for cash flow 
purposes. An asset might contain cash or something totally illiquid. The 
cash flow report does have the option of including loans and liabilities, 
but not assets.

However, "cash flow" itself isn't that clearly defined. If I get cash from 
an ATM, that's clearly cash. Money in a checking account is clearly cash. 
But what if I move money into a CD held in my IRA? It's got all the cash 
safety of a bank CD, but it's illiquid as far as I'm concerned. When I make 
a mortgage payment, I probably want to consider that a cash flow (my house 
is relatively illiquid), but under some circumstances I would want to treat 
my equity in my house as liquid (for example if I have a house equity line 
of credit that I can draw on at any time).

In general, I think that reporting is a very weak part of MD. Overall, I 
don't think Quicken is much better, even though there are some specific 
cases (like this one) where Quicken matches a particular user's needs 
better. When I got ready to switch, I looked at my Quicken reports and what 
MD could do and said well, MD may not do all I've been doing, but Quicken 
has been doing a damned poor job for me too. MD at least has the plug-in 
hooks, and maybe eventually I can write my own reports, in my Copious Spare 
Time (tm).

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