iCash as alternative to Microsoft Money

mmevans

New Member
I have a complex MS Money file including multi-currency accounts and extensive portfolios. Currently I am running Money in Virtual PC (slowly) and would like a native Mac application. So far I have tried various products (including Liquid Ledger) but nothing compares with Money or Quicken. I am UK based but have accounts and portfolios in US$ and Euro. Does anyone have experience of migrating from a complex Money or Quicken file?
 

johnbird

New Member
Only just seen your post after some absence from the forum. I am also in the UK and wanted to do exactly what you wanted. iCash does it better than any of the other programs. However, because of the way MS Money exports its data to the intermediate Quicken file format, you are more or less forced to import accounts one by one into iCash. The import works fine in that all categories and transactions will be imported correctly. There is a 'gotcha', though, because some transactions are mutual between accounts. For example, say you have a credit card balance that you pay off from a cheque account - that will appear as a withdrawal in the cheque account register but a deposit in the credit card register. Now, when you import the account data from these two accounts into icash, the two transactions appear correctly in each account but there is no way the system knows they are related transactions; the result is a correct record of all transacations but the balances are completely out. I had some 13 years of data and manually trying to correct this was pointless. I just had to bite the bullet and start a new file as if it began on 1 Jan 2006. I still have the transaction records for the previous 13 years in an archive that I can see in iCash (or MS Money via Virtual PC) but of you want continuity I don't thinks it's possible and it's not entirely iCash's fault.
 

mmevans

New Member
John,

Many thanks for your reply. I understand the problem (it is exactly the same issue I had when trying to use another alternative to Money). I will have to look carefully at the options. Since I'm currenty thinking of investing in an Intel Mac I might just be happy with using MS Money under BootCamp. I'll consider all the options, though, and thanks for your input.

Michael
 
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