Quicken or alternatives?

Banking and Saving strategies, maximizing interest rates, budgeting, GICs, HISAs.
pmj
Veteran Contributor
Veteran Contributor
Posts: 3412
Joined: 27 Feb 2005 18:15
Location: Ottawa

Re: Quicken or alternatives?

Post by pmj »

DenisD wrote:
IdOp wrote:just enter each of your investment positions in the new software as a Buy on the cut-off date for an amount equal to its ACB at that time.
Future return calculations would be wrong. Better to record both the ACB and the value.
Does KMM have the ability to record both ACB & value?
Peter

Patrick Hutber: Improvement means deterioration
DenisD
Veteran Contributor
Veteran Contributor
Posts: 4081
Joined: 19 Feb 2005 01:24
Location: Calgary

Re: Quicken or alternatives?

Post by DenisD »

I don't know. But my home grown Excel system does. :wink:
User avatar
AltaRed
Veteran Contributor
Veteran Contributor
Posts: 33398
Joined: 05 Mar 2005 20:04
Location: Ogopogo Land

Re: Quicken or alternatives?

Post by AltaRed »

DenisD wrote:
IdOp wrote:just enter each of your investment positions in the new software as a Buy on the cut-off date for an amount equal to its ACB at that time.
Future return calculations would be wrong. Better to record both the ACB and the value.
The point is to 'Add', not Buy, the shares in Quicken at their ACB on a date certain, e.g. 1/1/2017, and then use the update feature to get the market price as of that date. Any return performance going forward must then always use 1/1/2017 as the period start date. In my case, I used April 1, 2008 and any investment performance returns I calculate now use April 1, 2008 as the earliest start date.
Imagefiniki, the Canadian financial wiki The go-to place to bolster your financial freedom
User avatar
IdOp
Veteran Contributor
Veteran Contributor
Posts: 3873
Joined: 16 Feb 2006 11:27
Location: On the Pacific sea bed, 100 mi off the CA coast.
Contact:

Re: Quicken or alternatives?

Post by IdOp »

DenisD wrote:Future return calculations would be wrong. Better to record both the ACB and the value.
Good catch, I agree, thanks! So it should be best to do the Buy at the market value of the cut-off date, and follow it immediately by a Costbase Adjustment to get to the right ACB.
User avatar
IdOp
Veteran Contributor
Veteran Contributor
Posts: 3873
Joined: 16 Feb 2006 11:27
Location: On the Pacific sea bed, 100 mi off the CA coast.
Contact:

Re: Quicken or alternatives?

Post by IdOp »

AltaRed wrote:The point is to 'Add', not Buy, the shares in Quicken at their ACB on a date certain, e.g. 1/1/2017, and then use the update feature to get the market price as of that date.
I'm sure that works since you did it, but on the other hand at that time you were able to continue on using Quicken. The more general case will be someone who now abandons Quicken and moves to another software (of any kind to their liking). In this case exactly how to implement things will depend on the new software, but DenisD's point is important to be aware of: to try to work it in a way that makes both ACB and return calculations valid in the future.
crimsondr
Contributor
Contributor
Posts: 87
Joined: 04 Feb 2011 15:44

Re: Quicken or alternatives?

Post by crimsondr »

Does anyone use the mobile app for Quicken? I don't think any of the alternatives have a mobile counterpart.

I just tried Quicken 2016 and I couldn't get it to sync a cash account to the cloud.

Mobile app would be a huge pro in my book.
User avatar
AltaRed
Veteran Contributor
Veteran Contributor
Posts: 33398
Joined: 05 Mar 2005 20:04
Location: Ogopogo Land

Re: Quicken or alternatives?

Post by AltaRed »

Whatever are you trying to do with a mobile application for Quicken?
Imagefiniki, the Canadian financial wiki The go-to place to bolster your financial freedom
crimsondr
Contributor
Contributor
Posts: 87
Joined: 04 Feb 2011 15:44

Re: Quicken or alternatives?

Post by crimsondr »

AltaRed wrote:Whatever are you trying to do with a mobile application for Quicken?
Enter cash and credit card transactions as they occur so I don't forget later. Useful for cash transactions that have no receipt so I don't forget where I spent the money. Or when I pay for a group with my credit card and cash starts changing hands. Gets complicated when not everyone pays and I need to add it to their "tab". I have accounts that keep a running total of what I owe or am owed from certain people. I use to do this with Money on my Palm Treo many years ago but haven't had such functionality since.
User avatar
AltaRed
Veteran Contributor
Veteran Contributor
Posts: 33398
Joined: 05 Mar 2005 20:04
Location: Ogopogo Land

Re: Quicken or alternatives?

Post by AltaRed »

I'd suggest that is getting into counting the crickets on the forest floor....not just the trees in the forest. Forget using Quicken to balance small cash transactions.... lump it all into an ATM budget line and just use your online transactions or monthly statements to enter transactions at that level into Quicken. Your CC statement has all the granularity you need on CC transactions.

If you have a true Cash 'problem', use a simple cash management app on your mobile as a separate entity. Cash in = ATM withdrawals and whatever pennies and dollars you are squeezing out of others, and cash out is whatever 10 or 100 categories you want in your app.
Imagefiniki, the Canadian financial wiki The go-to place to bolster your financial freedom
pmj
Veteran Contributor
Veteran Contributor
Posts: 3412
Joined: 27 Feb 2005 18:15
Location: Ottawa

Re: Quicken or alternatives?

Post by pmj »

Thanks to crimsondr for reminding me of yet another really neat Palm Treo functionality that is no longer readily available :(.

There was a Pocket Quicken: http://www.landware.com/pocketquicken/palmos/ & https://www.amazon.com/Pocket-Quicken-P ... B0000A2QBQ (read the Amazon reviews for some interesting info ...)

This app, with a desktop program, was linked from the Amazon reviews: https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... horganizer - I wonder if KMM can import its csv files?
Peter

Patrick Hutber: Improvement means deterioration
crimsondr
Contributor
Contributor
Posts: 87
Joined: 04 Feb 2011 15:44

Re: Quicken or alternatives?

Post by crimsondr »

I spent the last week entering in all my information from January 1, 2017 onwards in both Quicken and Microsoft Money Sunset. In the past I have used Microsoft Money (15-20 years worth of data), although I haven't used anything to track my finances for a few years. I wanted to start tracking my finances more closely so decided to start with 2017. For some reason I really wanted to like Quicken which started this experiment. I created all relevant accounts in Microsoft Money first and imported all my transactions. Relatively painless as I am an experienced Microsoft Money user.

Quicken is where the learning began. First thing I noticed is that Quicken is so much slower than Money. Screen render noticeably slower and there is lag clicking between accounts. Importing transactions created duplicates. At first I didn't know why and just deleted the duplicates. After I realized it was because transactions from one account often translated to a transfer to another account. Quicken would detect this in one account and make it a transfer to the relevant account. Later when I imported the other account it wouldn't match the transactions and hence I ended up with duplicates. During my cleaning of duplicates I failed to notice this and ended up deleting transactions that were transfers and messed up the account on the other side. Next I tried to setup my mortgage. I entered the mortgage with the January 1, 2017 balance. Then went to my bank account and entered in transaction to pay the mortgage for January and February. Quicken entered these as straight principle payments and didn't calculate any interest. I tried to setup the mortgage with a special payee that would automatically adjust the principle/interest per payment but it didn't work. So I setup the mortgage from scratch again and tried to enter the next payment due as January 1 which it did not allow because it was in the past. So I selected March 1. Then comes the screen to configure the payment reminder, which asks again what is the next payment date. Here it allowed me to select January 1, 2017. Then I went into the bill section and could see two overdue payments for the mortgage. I clicked enter on the first and the Quicken screen flashed randomly for the next 10-15 seconds before the payment was entered and the application settled. Clicked enter on the February reminder and again flashing/flikering for another 10-15 seconds before it was done. I then decided to go back and finish reconciling the remainder of accounts but gave up after I realized I deleted too many incorrect double transactions and would have to import the accounts again.

At that point Money wins and I'm not going to try and like Quicken anymore lol... Another thing I noticed is that when Quicken can automatically download transactions from your bank it's called Express Web Connect. If you download ofx files and import them manually that is considered Web Connect. From what I can tell Web Connect is considered online functionality by Quicken so in 3 years that will also be disabled. I already considered downloading ofx files and importing them to be a manual entry. Luckily Money allows this even after being sunset for 8 years.

Money wins! It's basically a glorified spreadsheet but comes with a lot of canned reports that can be customized and gives me double entry that is difficult in Excel. Bill reminders and auto entry of bills is a plus also. Have all my investments setup properly to show the correct ACB but it isn't actually that important since I do have a spreadsheet for that (after a lot of questions on FWF, thanks!).
mwyddgrug
Contributor
Contributor
Posts: 17
Joined: 13 Oct 2007 18:58

Re: Quicken or alternatives?

Post by mwyddgrug »

ig17 wrote: 19 Feb 2017 01:17 I spent a couple of days playing with KMyMoney. I first tried to transfer Quicken data in one shot as a single QIF file. That attempt failed miserably: I got too many import errors in KMM.

I next tried to export/import the accounts one by one, each account in a separate QIF file. I was able to transfer all of the banking and credit card accounts with relatively few issues. KMM correctly matched about 60-70% of the transfers between the accounts. I manually fixed the remainder. Luckily, KMM interface for merging duplicate transactions is excellent, so this experience wasn't too painful. I also had to manually fix the transfers between CAD and USD accounts. KMM import uses 1:1 exchange rate by default because QIF file format doesn't support currencies.

But that was as far as I could get. Brokerage accounts fared far worse than banking/CC accounts. KMM import resulted in significant loss of data. Just to give one example, KMM import lost all interest payments in the brokerage accounts. So far, I haven't figured out how to solve this issue.
I think that many of the import problems are due to the QIF format being deliberately crippled, presumably in an attempt by Intuit to discourage deserters. Even Quicken 2014 cannot correctly reconstruct my finances from the QIF file that it generated! I think the QIF export function only exists as a tease and is sufficiently crippled such that those who try it will quickly conclude that the Quicken alternatives suck and begrudgingly pay Intuit for their annual "upgrades".

That said, the Quicken alternatives that I've tried did not support all the investment transaction types and some silently discarded the unsupported transactions. Arghhhhh! I grumbled that the KMM docs could at least have listed those transaction types that are NOT supported by the QIF import. However, with the QIF format being undocumented, the KMM developers have probably never encountered these transaction types, e.g. "ContribX" and "WithdrwX" were added to the Canadian version of Quicken when the TFSA support was added and have never been documented AFAIK.

From my QIF imports, I discovered that "StkSplit", "ReInvInt", "IntInc" without an associated security, "ContribX" and "WithdrwX" are unsupported by KMM 4.8.0. The workaround I used was to generate a Quicken Investment Transaction report containing just the unsupported Actions, export the report in Excel compatible format and then use the CSV import function in KMM to load the transactions. Tedious but it worked for all except the "StkSplit" transactions which I had to reenter manually.
User avatar
LadyGeek
Veteran Contributor
Veteran Contributor
Posts: 1975
Joined: 26 Oct 2011 16:51
Location: Philadelphia, PA
Contact:

Re: Quicken or alternatives?

Post by LadyGeek »

I just purchased Moneydance and will be dumping Quicken. I posted this in the Bogleheads' forum. Bear in mind I'm in the US.
I just downloaded the trial version of Moneydance, which is the full version with a limit of 100 manual transaction entries. The trial version has no limit of automated downloads, so I was able to give it a full checkout for all of my financial institutions. I had no problems whatsoever using the QFX format, including Vanguard and my employer's 401(k).

My initial impression was very positive. It only took a few minutes to figure out the user interface, as I was used to Quicken. The layout and report formats are what one would expect. In comparison, Quicken's report formats are constrained and clunky.

My next test was importing my Quicken info. Following the instructions here, Moneydance imported my info just fine (be sure to check all the boxes in the Quicken export menu). The only problems were that the balances on two accounts were off. Why? The QIF had duplicate entries but looked OK in Quicken. After removing the duplicates, everything agreed.

The software isn't perfect and has a few quirks (like not being able to sort the sidebar account order, a very minor nit). That being said, I felt confident that Moneydance could replace Quicken and purchased the license key.

Next, Moneydance's license agreement is much better than Quicken. See: How Many License Keys do I Need?

I'm allowed as many computers as I want within my household. Not to mention that Moneydance also works in Linux, as my main desktop is dual-boot Linux / Win 7. As for purchasing Moneydance, pay attention to the last paragraph. Downloading from amazon.com will lock you in to amazon.com's license agreement. Additionally, Moneydance offers a 90 day refund guarantee. I don't know what amazon.com would do if you weren't happy.

Don't buy from amazon.com, go to Moneydance and purchase from them directly. The $49.99 listed price is the same, but the Moneydance purchase checkout screen has an entry for "Discount code". A quick google search shows Moneydance's Facebook page has a 20% discount code: "DANCEFB2017". Works fine, I got Moneydance for $39.99.

I'll be transitioning from Quicken to Moneydance and then cut out Quicken completely.
In that same discussion, Bylo Selhi expressed concerns that Moneydance does not support Return of Capital nor Reinvested Distributions, which are used for Canadian ETFs. The post is here.

I don't have a need for Return of Capital nor Reinvested Distribution, but Moneydance is extensible meaning that it will support Python scripts and extensions. It might be worth looking into, as Moneydance provides Developer Resources.
Imagefiniki, the Canadian financial wiki To some, the glass is half full. To others, the glass is half empty. To an engineer, it's twice the size it needs to be.
User avatar
IdOp
Veteran Contributor
Veteran Contributor
Posts: 3873
Joined: 16 Feb 2006 11:27
Location: On the Pacific sea bed, 100 mi off the CA coast.
Contact:

Re: Quicken or alternatives?

Post by IdOp »

A couple of PITA-ish workarounds might be possible:

RoC: You could sell the required number of units to reduce the ACB by the RoC amount plus one penny, then buy those units back immediately for a penny. This should get the ACB and net cash flow right, but you'd have to ignore the capital gain on the sale.

Distributed CG Tax Liability: You could do the old distribute cash, reinvest and consolidate trick. You'd have to remember that the distribution is tagged as capital gain.

Neither of these are particularly clean, but if these events are rare enough ... it's an option I guess.
User avatar
GreatLaker
Contributor
Contributor
Posts: 662
Joined: 16 Dec 2014 13:02
Location: Toronto

Re: Quicken or alternatives?

Post by GreatLaker »

LadyGeek wrote: 03 Apr 2017 23:25 I just purchased Moneydance and will be dumping Quicken. I posted this in the Bogleheads' forum. Bear in mind I'm in the US.
Thanks for the detailed post. :thumbsup: Today I got the email I expected but was not looking forward to:
Quicken wrote: Critical Service Alert
Your connected services with Quicken will be discontinued as of (date).

Our records indicate that you are using the 2014 version of Quicken Windows software. When you purchased your Quicken Windows 2014 product, it included the ability to use connected services like downloading your transactions and balances and accessing chat and phone support. As of (date), your access to these connected services will expire and be discontinued. Subscribe now and save 10%*

You can continue to use your Quicken Windows 2014 product; however, you won’t be able to continue using connected services and live support.

Frequently used Quicken 2014 services to be discontinued include:
  • Downloading your transactions and balances from financial institutions and having them automatically categorized in Quicken
  • Accessing live chat or phone support for free
  • Downloading stock quotes and news headlines to Quicken
Take action now
Subscribe to the new 2017 release of Quicken Canada by May 31, 2017, to keep your connected services.* Get powerful money management with the convenience of a new subscription plan.

Enjoy all the benefits of our new subscription plan
  • No more upgrade hassles—you always have the latest version as soon as it's released
  • Includes NEW! Premium Support for priority access to official customer support
  • NEW! Manage your money from anywhere with our new mobile app for iPhone, iPad and Android devices*.
  • Plus over 100+ enhancements and updates you asked for including improved bank downloads, easier update process, investments and improved reporting
  • Learn more about our new subscription plan
When I clicked through to their site I got a pop-up asking if I wanted to fill in a survey about the website, so I took the opportunity to say I was not going to purchase because of the new pricing model and the fact it would be crippled if I ever ended my subscription. :evil: And the fact that I was investigating KMyMoney and Moneydance.

I enter all my own transactions and only d/l transactions for my chequing account as a check, so I can live without that. I like downloading security prices, but can probably live without it and use some other tool like Google Finance. It might even cure me of my incessant need to check my portfolio value way too frequently. I track my ACB elsewhere so can live without RoC and Reinvested Distribution transactions.

At this point my plan is to live with my current version of Q2014.

P.S. @ LadyGeek are you Lady Gaga's smart techie sister?
When I was young, I was poor. Now, after years of hard work, I am no longer young.
User avatar
LadyGeek
Veteran Contributor
Veteran Contributor
Posts: 1975
Joined: 26 Oct 2011 16:51
Location: Philadelphia, PA
Contact:

Re: Quicken or alternatives?

Post by LadyGeek »

^^^ Thanks for the info. I have Quicken 2015 which will probably hit sunset next year.

After using Moneydance for a few days, I like it better than Quicken. Once you get used to the interface, it's much more intuitive. Reports show what I want, in a format that makes sense.

Selecting transactions (in the register or downloads) works just like selecting files in MS Windows - Shift+click to select a range, Ctrl+click for individual selections. You just can't do that in Quicken.

Quicken's interface just seems old and difficult to use in comparison. It's not as "slick" in a few areas, but it works. Editing and managing reminders make a lot more sense.

Oh, and it works just fine in Linux. Since it's written in java (not javascript - that's for your browser), it looks the same as it does in Windows. Download the .rpm file, install, done.

My only complaint so far is that a few financial institutions don't support the connection which allows me to pull a download from within Moneydance directly. I have to login to the institution directly then download a QFX file. It does work, though. Vanguard and my employer's 401(k) plan provider (similar to an RRSP) can pull downloads directly.
GreatLaker wrote: 05 Apr 2017 19:07 P.S. @ LadyGeek are you Lady Gaga's smart techie sister?
Let's just say I prefer to remain anonymous. :)
Imagefiniki, the Canadian financial wiki To some, the glass is half full. To others, the glass is half empty. To an engineer, it's twice the size it needs to be.
chufinora
Contributor
Contributor
Posts: 769
Joined: 12 Oct 2009 15:03
Location: Ottawa

Re: Quicken or alternatives?

Post by chufinora »

After more than 15 years as a second-hand (Mac) Quicken user I ditched Quicken for Mint.com 3-4 years ago (An Intuit website/product which was what Quicken was but isn't anymore). Works fine for my needs (Basic spending analysis - for investment results/analysis I prefer spreadsheets. Auto categorizes transactions (I only have to correct less than 5%) provides decent analysis tools trends etc. and can export transactions to a csv file.

I am aware the Canadian banks are cagey/non-compliant in support of mint.com and in using it you are technically non-compliant with their security rules (As you are giving your password to a third party) but no Canadian Bank is offering an alternative aggregation service and I have sufficient trust in the Intuit service (If it was breached it would be a major issue for a huge number of people) though I would prefer (and wish banks would provide) a read only password option for on-line banking.
Post Reply