R52.19, Big update or big miss?

Chris_QPW

Entry in the release notes caught my eye.

• Quicken now supports importing investment transactions from Quicken Mac, enhancing cross-platform data handling.

That might be big for Quicken Mac to Quicken Windows people, it will be interesting to see how people's conversions go. But as a strictly Windows user my interest in this is in a different area, what would happen for a Windows user exporting their data file in QXF format and then importing it back? Not importing investment transactions has been one of the main reasons that something like this can't be used for say, trying to remove corruption from a data file.

So, I tried it with my data file.

Right away on the export it warns about Quicken Mac not supporting ESOs and ESPP accounts (a have these accounts that are long time closed).

I proceeded with the import into a new data file where I had removed all the categories, so that I don't have remove them later.

During the import I got a few surprises, some good, some not so good, some just interesting.

Good:

• Reminders are transferred.
• Which accounts are hidden is remembered.
• Account grouping was remembered.
• Cash accounts seemed to convert fine.

Interesting:

• The import of transactions seems to have been handled by creating QFX "records" and then importing them in.

Not so good:

• A few OL-221-A errors were reported. I have no idea on the result of this, but an OL-221-A error is usually a syntax error in the OFX data.
• Split transactions were lost. (and it proceed to put in Add/Remove transactions at the top of the investment register to compensate).
• Add/Remove transactions were consolidated at put at the start of the account (date sort wise).
• Investment transactions are out of order, making it really hard to try to compare the old data file register to the new one. (I bought up the new Quicken data file in a Virtual Machine).

In the end I just gave up. Just too much work for me especially since I have no real problems with my original data file, but it is interesting, and it will be even more interesting to see if now that the Quicken Developers have gone this far if they will continue improving on this.

I would like to add one more thing. I would like to thank everyone at Quicken Inc for all they are doing and trying to do. I absolutely understand how hard this can be given the situation that "history" has given them, and the fact that almost everything they hear from Quicken users is negative (at least in this forum).

Again, thank you.

Chris