Help make my PC to Mac personal finance software quick and painless!
June 30, 2010 11:56 AM Subscribe
What is the best way to move years of financial data from AceMoney on Windows to anything on OSX and not screw it all up?
Hey Everyone!
So I've been a mixed-breed computer user for quite some time now, using both Macs and PCs on a daily basis. For whatever reason, some time ago I made the decision to do all of my personal financial management on a PC...
I quickly discovered Ace Money and fell in love with it! I now have several years worth of data built up in Ace Money, spanning several accounts. For reasons I won't go into here, I have decided to make my primary home machine a new Mac, and as such, I would like to start doing my financial management on this machine.
Now I face the (seemingly) daunting task of getting all of this data, unaltered, into something that I can use on my Mac. I didn't just jump into this post blindly, so after some searching here and elsewhere I came across Moneydance.
Now while Moneydance runs natively on my new Mac, and it looks like a great program in its own rights, when I export my accounts from Ace Money to a QIF and then import these QIF files into Moneydance, everything goes wonky. Accounts with positive balances in Ace Money are now showing up as thousands of dollars in the negative in Moneydance.
Not wanting to spend a great deal of time sorting all of that out, I gave up and started looking for other options...
Option 1 - Find a native OSX program that has similar functionality to Ace Money and will not screw up importing the data from Ace Money.
Option 2 - Install Ace Money on OSX using Wine (not currently installed on my OSX install), and just keep using it that way.
Option 3 - Install Ace Money on Paralles (already installed on my OSX install), and keep using it that way.
Option 3 seems right out to me, as even when I suspend my Windows 7 VM in paralles, it still takes several minutes to load up, and it just seems silly to wait 2-3 minutes every time I want to enter a transaction.
Option 2 seems alright to me, as I have installed Wine on other machines before, and it's not really that difficult to get up and running. I'm only scared of this method, as it is emulation, and this is my financial data, so one hiccup in the emulation and I could possibly lose my data.
Option 1 seems optimal, but I'm just not having any luck tracking something down.
So, I turn it over to the good folks in the cloud! Have any of you been in this exact situation before, and if so, what did you do? Maybe a similar situation? Any assistance is greatly appreciated!
Hey Everyone!
So I've been a mixed-breed computer user for quite some time now, using both Macs and PCs on a daily basis. For whatever reason, some time ago I made the decision to do all of my personal financial management on a PC...
I quickly discovered Ace Money and fell in love with it! I now have several years worth of data built up in Ace Money, spanning several accounts. For reasons I won't go into here, I have decided to make my primary home machine a new Mac, and as such, I would like to start doing my financial management on this machine.
Now I face the (seemingly) daunting task of getting all of this data, unaltered, into something that I can use on my Mac. I didn't just jump into this post blindly, so after some searching here and elsewhere I came across Moneydance.
Now while Moneydance runs natively on my new Mac, and it looks like a great program in its own rights, when I export my accounts from Ace Money to a QIF and then import these QIF files into Moneydance, everything goes wonky. Accounts with positive balances in Ace Money are now showing up as thousands of dollars in the negative in Moneydance.
Not wanting to spend a great deal of time sorting all of that out, I gave up and started looking for other options...
Option 1 - Find a native OSX program that has similar functionality to Ace Money and will not screw up importing the data from Ace Money.
Option 2 - Install Ace Money on OSX using Wine (not currently installed on my OSX install), and just keep using it that way.
Option 3 - Install Ace Money on Paralles (already installed on my OSX install), and keep using it that way.
Option 3 seems right out to me, as even when I suspend my Windows 7 VM in paralles, it still takes several minutes to load up, and it just seems silly to wait 2-3 minutes every time I want to enter a transaction.
Option 2 seems alright to me, as I have installed Wine on other machines before, and it's not really that difficult to get up and running. I'm only scared of this method, as it is emulation, and this is my financial data, so one hiccup in the emulation and I could possibly lose my data.
Option 1 seems optimal, but I'm just not having any luck tracking something down.
So, I turn it over to the good folks in the cloud! Have any of you been in this exact situation before, and if so, what did you do? Maybe a similar situation? Any assistance is greatly appreciated!
I'm the author of Moneydance and might be able to help with the migration. The easiest step might be to simply clean up the data after the QIF import. There are certain types of transactions for which Moneydance might encounter duplicates that it is unable to reconcile during the import process:
- transfers between accounts with different currencies
- certain transfers into or out of investment accounts
- transfers in which one "side" of the transaction was deleted or changed, making the transfer inconsistent
Finding each of the above transactions should be mostly straightforward by sorting your register by "category" and then scrolling to the section (usually the top) that has the transfer transactions. Look for transactions with the same date, transfer destination, and a similar (or same) amount. The duplicates should then be clear.
As gum mentioned, the QIF import isn't great but OFX wouldn't apply here either as it doesn't specify category information. OFX is meant for communicating with banks to download transactions and submit payments (and other messages).
I'm obviously biased, but I don't know of any app that imports QIF files more cleanly than Moneydance.
posted by sreilly at 6:16 AM on July 1, 2010
- transfers between accounts with different currencies
- certain transfers into or out of investment accounts
- transfers in which one "side" of the transaction was deleted or changed, making the transfer inconsistent
Finding each of the above transactions should be mostly straightforward by sorting your register by "category" and then scrolling to the section (usually the top) that has the transfer transactions. Look for transactions with the same date, transfer destination, and a similar (or same) amount. The duplicates should then be clear.
As gum mentioned, the QIF import isn't great but OFX wouldn't apply here either as it doesn't specify category information. OFX is meant for communicating with banks to download transactions and submit payments (and other messages).
I'm obviously biased, but I don't know of any app that imports QIF files more cleanly than Moneydance.
posted by sreilly at 6:16 AM on July 1, 2010
Hopefully sreilly can sort your issues out. If not you can try iBank. I've not used AceMoney so I can't say if the feature set is comparable or not. Given what sreilly said above, I imagine you'd get the same issues.
posted by chairface at 7:48 AM on July 7, 2010
posted by chairface at 7:48 AM on July 7, 2010
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by gum at 1:59 PM on June 30, 2010