[moneydance] help with setup

[Martha]

Thanks Edward, your information is helpful. I finally got everything set up
properly...well, almost. My Moneydance & check register match. But they are
off a bit from my bank balance even after downloading transactions from my
account. I decided to give myself a break from it today. I'll check into it
one more time tomorrow and if I don't find the error, then I'll probably do
as you suggest and make the balance adjust to my bank's balance using a
"black hole" account.

Martha

On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 11:19 PM, Edward Reid <edward at paleo.org> wrote:

> Finances are never intuitive. ;-)
>
> Some of your questions have already been answered well. One thing to note
> is that moving data via QIF will almost always introduce errors. That's
> because the QIF format is basically incomplete -- it only has single-sided
> transactions, and it's up to the importing program to guess how to match
> them. MD actually imports QIF files from Quicken much better than Quicken
> itself does. I can't speak for MoneyPlus, with which I have no experience.
>
> When you have an account open, you can edit the account, including the
> initial balance. MD tends to do the import by creating a fictitious account
> and a transfer from it -- at least it did a couple of years ago, and from
> what others are saying, it sounds like this has not changed. I'm not sure
> why Sean hasn't fixed this, because probably 90% of the time it could
> figure out that it just needs an initial balance. But I went through all
> those fictitious accounts, got rid of them, and put the amount of that one
> transaction into the initial balance for the real account.
>
> Creating a "black hole", or "balance adjustment", account (or category,
> which is pretty much the same thing in MD) is something that most people
> have to do eventually. Some accounts just aren't worth the trouble of
> balancing down to the last cent, or you don't keep up with an account for a
> while and want to bring it back into balance without altering the initial
> balance and thus affecting the old records. Getting money from, or sending
> it to, the balance adjustment account is the way we do this.
>
> Edward
> --
> Art works by Melynda Reid: http://paleo.org
>
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