Dd852
Full time employment: Posting here.
I've been happy with Banktivity for a couple of years now. And it was easy to migrate from quicken at the time. worth a look
GNUcash can be a bit intimidating on first acquaintance . Click on the import Quicken QIF ( Or QFX) and watch it whir for a few hours and afterwards you look at the files and it doesn't make any sense... Been there, done that. My first experience after importing 20+ years of Quicken data is - this doesn't make any sense.From what I read, the new Quicken version still resides on your computer, but needs yearly licensing to run.
About moving to other programs, both GNUCash and KMyMoney threw up error messages that totally confounded me. Perhaps someone with an accounting background knows this stuff, but I am only a miser who likes to count his beans in various accounts, and wants to keep track of money going in/out of each account. And I look at accounts as in IRA, checking accounts, HSA, etc..., and not accounts billable or receivables or something like that which businesses use.
When I imported MS Money file into Quicken 6 years ago, I had some problems, but they were not as severe as the ones I see now. Why is this so tough? Could it be due to Quicken not exporting all the info to screw up attempts to migrate to other software packages?
I may go back and try to export/import just a smaller account with few activities to understand this a bit better. Darn! This can waste a lot of my time.
Question for those Quicken users who currently use an older version of Quicken (before 2014) that no longer supports online downloads. Can you still import QIF files or is that also blocked?
Does GnuCash support scripting?
I've recently started writing python scripts for Moneydance. I've already been able to ditch one spreadsheet I used for forecasting cashflows. I'm now working on a script that will make it easier for my portfolio analysis. Right now I do this manually using spreadsheets and having it automated with a python script will save me a lot of time and give me better data.
For example, I track my portfolio cashflows and at the end of the year, compare my performance with my benchmark funds. Right now this is all manual and it takes me a couple of hours to get done for the various benchmarks I track. It's also very tedious, because I need to take into consideration dividend payouts, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if my numbers are not a 100% accurate (but I figure close enough).
Using python with Moneydance, I should be able to automate this analysis. This is just one example, but having access to your entire transaction set in a python script is powerful. I've overlooked this feature for years, but now that I've found it I feel like I won the data mining jackpot.
Another idea: I wonder if I can take my Moneydance data and automatically populate entries within my google spreadsheet?
Right now I have to manually enter total number of shares for each fund that I own. If I can auto-populate this using a script, that would save me more time.
At this point, if I was looking into any personal finance software, I wouldn't even look at anything that wouldn't let me access my data easily. Heck, if I ever had to leave Moneydance, I could write a script that will export all the data to make it easier to import elsewhere (such as a spreadsheet). I realize this isn't for everyone, but for anybody that likes to tinker a little bit and is comfortable with basic scripting, this is a feature you should consider before committing to a new app.
You can store your GnuCash data in MySQL or a couple of other databases. You can't get much more flexible or powerful than that!
$100 for access to 5 PCs, $70 for access to one PC at the MS Store. In either case, if you need the latest for some reason, still cheaper to get the subscription rather than buying the software. Using Amazon ($69.99 for Office Personal subscription model - for one PC, or $70 for 5 PCs (marked down from $99.99), v. Office Professional $359.99 + tax
- Rita
But can you only store Office files or files which would really use up that storage like photo, audio, video files?
Can you stream those media files from the MS cloud?
If they only let you store Office files, you won't come close o using that space with just some Excel and Word docs.
That's only part of it! I came to this conclusion from a completely different route - I was looking for some cloud storage solutions for photos, documents, etc. (more than is offered by the "free" ones). I found out that most are all charging $5-10 per month for cloud storage alone.
Turns out this same $99/year for Office includes 1TB of cloud storage for up to 5 people EACH - so, 5TB total on Microsoft's OneDrive. When you throw in Office 365 for the same price, its a complete no-brainer!
While I plan to use Quicken as long as I can without paying the potential price increase (I'm ok with $25 a year but $75 annually is not going to happen)... I recently took over as treasurer of an association so it seemed a good opportunity to download and use Gnucash.
It's ok... not near as good as Quicken... and the reporting capabilities are poor at best. I'll use it for basic tracking but will probably use some downloads to LibreCalc for reporting.
I moved away from Quicken last year, no regrets. I switched to iBank (now Banktivity). I do not recommend it either. I inexplicably lost 4 months of data with this software. So I am back to using spreadsheets. I miss Quicken's powerful reporting feature, but we simplified our finances a lot since DW retired so it is no big loss.
It does if the file is of a proprietary nature i.e., only that software can read it. In Lightroom the files are not proprietary but in Photoshop the .psd files (I think) are. But you can still read/edit them if not too advanced in the cheaper Photoshop Elements software, which is not subscription.
And of course in Lightroom or Photoshop you can export anything to one of several open-source files such as .jpg.
While I plan to use Quicken as long as I can without paying the potential price increase (I'm ok with $25 a year but $75 annually is not going to happen)... I recently took over as treasurer of an association so it seemed a good opportunity to download and use Gnucash.
It's ok... not near as good as Quicken... and the reporting capabilities are poor at best. I'll use it for basic tracking but will probably use some downloads to LibreCalc for reporting.
I'm using MoneyDance for myself and for a condo association. Works well, most reporting is OK. If I need something special, I export a file to Excel and customize.
- Rita
As a test I exported 1 weeks worth of transactions from my Chase checking account to a QIF file and tried to import it into Quicken 2016. In Quicken a QIF Import window opened up and there was a note stating that "QIF import is not available for checking, savings, credit cards, 401K, and all other brokerage accounts". In the QIF Import window you're given a drop down menu to select the account to import the QIF file to and all of my accounts that fall in any of the categories above were not available to select. So I guess the answer to my own question is that although QIF files can be used in newer versions of Quicken their use seems to be very very limited.