Status report: finished importing my QMac2007 investment data into QMac2019
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In a previous post I documented my woes importing QMac2007 investment data into QMac2019. That conversation is now locked, and so I'm starting a new thread to give my final-ish report. I've tagged this conversation as a question only because I couldn't find another appropriate type. Dunno if anyone will read this whole thing but maybe someone will find it interesting.
The first thing I did was to merge the transactions from all my individual mutual fund accounts into the brokerage account where those funds are held. Because there was no way to actually transfer the transactions, I had to re-enter all of them. All I can say about that is: thank god I'm not an active trader. That was incredibly tedious and really had me questioning my life choices. But I got it done eventually.
At that point the import into QMac2019 worked.... mostly OK I guess.
My registers were now about 2 months out of date. So I thought I'd try taking advantage of automatic downloads (in the past I always did everything manually). Got it set up, and then... it only downloaded the last week or two of transactions. If there was a way to force it to load everything since my last manually-entered transaction, I couldn't figure out what that might be. Worse, though, everything was entered as literal translations of what was downloaded. That's all you could reasonably expect it to do, but it's not what I wanted. For instance, TDA lists divident re-investments as two transactions: a dividend and then a purchase (and sometimes there are MM sweeps and sales interspersed in there). That certainly works and is technically correct, but it also makes a mess of the register. I've always entered those as a single reinvest transaction. There were other small issues not worth going into.
At this point I needed a sanity break and walked away for a while.
This week I decided to get things in order. So I deleted all the downloaded transactions, turned off automatic updates, and went back to the way I used to do it. I find entering the transactions in Q2019 to be a mixed bag. Although it is a lot prettier, it also in some areas takes a lot more keystrokes and/or mouse interactions to enter a transaction. Entering MMF transactions is particularly annoying; because it seems you must enter dollar value and number of shares. For MMFs where the share value is (almost) always $1, that means needing to enter the same number twice. In the old Quicken, I could just enter the dollar value and a quick "1" for the share value, and then it fills in the number of shares. Oh well.
I also discovered that, presumably when I did my automatic transaction download, Quicken added a bunch of "add shares" transactions to the beginning of my ledger to get the share balances to square up. It took me a long time and a lot of hair pulling to discover those were there, because of course I didn't want them.
Now, as far as I can tell, everything is up-to-date. I have a pretty, modern, Mac-native UI, with a mixed bag of functionality. Better in some areas, lacking in others. Thanks to the poster in the previous thread who mentioned customizing the columns in the register, that certainly has proved to be helpful. Overall it's a wash I guess. I am at least encouraged that the app is under active development.
Oh, an finally: sometimes it takes me several seconds to switch from the Register view to the Portfolio view. Geez.
The first thing I did was to merge the transactions from all my individual mutual fund accounts into the brokerage account where those funds are held. Because there was no way to actually transfer the transactions, I had to re-enter all of them. All I can say about that is: thank god I'm not an active trader. That was incredibly tedious and really had me questioning my life choices. But I got it done eventually.
At that point the import into QMac2019 worked.... mostly OK I guess.
My registers were now about 2 months out of date. So I thought I'd try taking advantage of automatic downloads (in the past I always did everything manually). Got it set up, and then... it only downloaded the last week or two of transactions. If there was a way to force it to load everything since my last manually-entered transaction, I couldn't figure out what that might be. Worse, though, everything was entered as literal translations of what was downloaded. That's all you could reasonably expect it to do, but it's not what I wanted. For instance, TDA lists divident re-investments as two transactions: a dividend and then a purchase (and sometimes there are MM sweeps and sales interspersed in there). That certainly works and is technically correct, but it also makes a mess of the register. I've always entered those as a single reinvest transaction. There were other small issues not worth going into.
At this point I needed a sanity break and walked away for a while.
This week I decided to get things in order. So I deleted all the downloaded transactions, turned off automatic updates, and went back to the way I used to do it. I find entering the transactions in Q2019 to be a mixed bag. Although it is a lot prettier, it also in some areas takes a lot more keystrokes and/or mouse interactions to enter a transaction. Entering MMF transactions is particularly annoying; because it seems you must enter dollar value and number of shares. For MMFs where the share value is (almost) always $1, that means needing to enter the same number twice. In the old Quicken, I could just enter the dollar value and a quick "1" for the share value, and then it fills in the number of shares. Oh well.
I also discovered that, presumably when I did my automatic transaction download, Quicken added a bunch of "add shares" transactions to the beginning of my ledger to get the share balances to square up. It took me a long time and a lot of hair pulling to discover those were there, because of course I didn't want them.
Now, as far as I can tell, everything is up-to-date. I have a pretty, modern, Mac-native UI, with a mixed bag of functionality. Better in some areas, lacking in others. Thanks to the poster in the previous thread who mentioned customizing the columns in the register, that certainly has proved to be helpful. Overall it's a wash I guess. I am at least encouraged that the app is under active development.
Oh, an finally: sometimes it takes me several seconds to switch from the Register view to the Portfolio view. Geez.
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