[moneydance] Questions

[Gary Robinson]

>> 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.

I just now tried it. It will help me get the info together that I need 
for my accountant, but it's not a balance sheet. MD needs a full-power 
historical Balance Sheet report like Quicken has.

This should not be difficult stuff from a programming perspective. 
Adding this basic functionality to MD shouldn't be hard and would make 
a huge difference to users who are using MD in professional settings. I 
hope they are working on the reports now as one of their main focuses 
if not their main focus -- I wouldn't be surprised to know they were.

>> 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.

 The transactions I'm talking about are purchases, from my checking or 
credit card accounts, that went into the purchase of assets.  I can't 
see why ANY movement of money out of, for instance, a checking account 
shouldn't at least OPTIONALLY be considered a "cash flow" whether it's 
being used to purchase an asset or to pay a loan.  Maybe there's some 
technicality of the accounting science that I'm missing here? If MD is 
going to give us the ability to include payments to loans, then why not 
purchases of assets? I just want to know where my money went -- what 
advantage is there in MD deciding it won't tell me for such cases?

Hopefully this will be changed in a future release -- it certainly 
doesn't seem like a major development task to add that ability.

-- 

Gary Robinson
Blog:    http://www.garyrobinson.net