Fixing a conversion from Windows to Mac issue related to brokerage account

joanpech

Please forwards this to Quicken CEO in response to his May 24 update email.

MY WIFE AND I have been a user of Quicken Windows since 1983. So we have over 40 years of data! We have been using MacIntosh OS for many years running VMWARE Fusion to be able to use Quicken Windows. I have tried several times in the past to switch to Quicken for Mac unsuccessfully, documenting the data conversion problem that prevents us from doing the switch. I copy below the documentation that I have sent to the support team in the past. The screw-up occurs on every cash transfer from a brokerage account (rather than a bank account) and the subsequent purchase of money market fund. Through time the deposits from the brokerage account never show up resulting in a negative balance of many thousands of dollars. However all the bank account deposits do show up. This ought to be fixed: thereafter the conversion will be 100% successful with the exact same dollar amounts on all reports.

PLEASE FIX THIS! GIVEN that we have 40 years of data, it will allow all your legacy Windows customers to avoid paying for VMWARE and expand your market. OTHERWISE, please to not send me anymore your update email. IT WOULD MAKE CLEAR TO ME AND OUR COMMUNITY THAT YOU ARE ONLY INTERESTED IN MILKING THE LEGACY ACCOUNTS THAT YOU GOT WHEN YOU BOUGHT THE COMPANY AND DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOUR CUSTOMERS. OR MAY BE, YOU DO NOT HAVE THE PROGRAMMERS CAPABLE OF FIXING THE PROBLEM.

SINCERELY Bernard Pech

joanpech

Bank Account - Mac Transaction.png

Bank Account - Windows Transaction.PNG

Brokerage account - Mac transactions as translated automatically.png

Brokerage account - Windows BoughtX transaction.PNG

This is the documentation on the conversion screwup. Bernard Pech

jacobs

@joanpech This is a Community website, with mostly fellow Quicken users (like me!) trying to help each other, and a few Quicken moderators to keep things organized. I don't think your message will make it from here to the CEO's desk, nor is the CEO the person you need to reach to get this issue resolved.

My first question is whether you have called Quicken Support — which, to make clear, this site is not — to have them review your conversion logs to try to help you with this issue. You said you send documentation to support, but there is really no way to communicate with them via email. If you used Report a Problem inside the program, it's hard to know what they did with the reports. Quicken Support is intentionally set up to be interactive, and while you can use phone or chat, you should definitely use phone for this issue because the representatives can connect with your Mac to examine the conversion log files and see what you're seeing.

The issue is that Quicken Mac does not have the -X type of investment transactions (BOUGHTX, SOLDX) that Quicken Windows does. In Quicken Mac, you need to have two transactions: one for the BUY or SELL, another for the transfer for where the cash is coming from/going to. The Windows-to-Mac converter utility is supposed to handle this automatically, and it seems like it does work successfully for most people because I don't see this issue raised very often. I'm a lifelong Mac user, so I can't really help with what may be making your conversion not work correctly for these -X investment transactions when it works for others. Unless anyone else jumps in here with a possible solution, I think you ought to pursue this with Quicken Support because it should work. (That's according to a former Quicken Mac product manager, when this was brought up a number of years ago.)

I assume that with data going back to 1995, you likely have lots of these -X transactions. You probably won't like this suggestion, but I;'m going to throw it out there: it would be helpful if you could try to quantify how roughly many there are. Is it 150 or 500 or 5,000? Because it is possible, although it would be annoying and take some time, to create the transfer transactions to get your account balances back to correct values — if the number of transactions isn't in the thousands. You don't have to do them all at once; you could do them in bits and pieces over a few weeks to spread out the work. You might also be able to cheat a bit and group a number of the transfers together into a single transaction. (That is, if your source or destination of cash was one account, rather than recording every transfer individually, you could add up all the transactions for a month, or three months, or possibly even a year, and enter a single transfer transaction for the combined amount. While not precisely historically accurate, it wouldn't really impact your history at all.

I know you will be saying: "But I shouldn't have to do this; Quicken should do it for me!" And you're correct; it should! Perhaps Quicken Support can help you get this resolved. I'm just suggesting a possible way to work the problem to get past it; once your past data is corrected, it won't be a problem going forward. But again, I don't know if you have several hundred transactions (a plausible number to address via manual entry of transfers, in my opinion) or if you have many thousands of such transactions which would make this truly impractical.