Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Wed Jan 11, 2006 1:49 am

It's a New Year, so time for a New Rant Twisted Evil

Guess what I have been working on for the past several days? CMUD? I wish. No, I've been stuggling with financial management software. At the beginning of the year, Zugg Software was changed from a Sole Proprietorship to an S-CORP. As an S-CORP, we will have the liability protection of a corporation, along with some tax benefits.

So rejoice! Zuggsoft is now "Zugg Software, Inc."! (wow, it sounds so cool)

The downside of this change is that we have a lot more paperwork now. And our accountant wants us to use Quickbooks from Intuit. I have over 10 years of financial data already in Microsoft Money. And Chiara is taking over the bookkeeping and I don't want her to need to use two different programs. So I needed to find a way to import all of our MS Money data into Quickbooks.

You'd think that this would be easy. After all, Microsoft is a major competitor, and usually it's to your advantage to provide good import tools for your competing products to make it easy for people to switch products.

Wrong.

Quickbooks can import Quicken. That's about it. OK, fine, I have a copy of Quicken 2004 lying around. Quicken should be able to easily import data from MS Money, right?? Wrong again. I'm amazed at this, but it's actually *really hard* to import data from MS Money into Quicken. It's a *lot* easier to go the other way and migrate from Quicken to Money (which is probably why Microsoft has been stealing away the market share from Quicken).

OK, so I went to the Intuit web site and searching for converting MS Money data. Turns out that they have a "Data Converter" program that does this. You need to own both programs (fine), and create a report from MS Money, save it, run the Converter program, and it creates the Quicken file.

So I run the Converter and it mostly works. Unfortunately it has a fatal flaw: When the Converter automatically creates the accounts in Quicken, it creates them ALL as "Bank" accounts. This is bad for "Credit card" accounts. When a Credit Card account is imported from MS Money, it gets marked as a "Bank" account, and when later imported into Quickbooks, all transactions are marked as "CHK" (check) instead of "CC" (credit card) and you cannot set up any online services because the account type is incorrect.

Further searching of the Intuit site shows that this is a known problem with the Data Converter, and has been a problem for years, and Intuit has never fixed it. But it also says that telephone support for converting data is free. So I call their support line.

Guess where Intuit has exported their telephone support? Yep, along with all of the other companies looking for cheap phone support, I get someone obviously in India, and obviously sitting in front of a simple Knowledge Base. First I have to convince him that this is a data conversion issue and is free. Then we go step by step through all of the proceses that I've already tried. At least it's a toll-free call. I try to be patient and follow along.

He confirms the problem with the Data Converter (after about 20 minutes!). OK, so the next step is to try and manually import a QIF account file. Fortunately, I was still using the old Quicken 2004. The newer versions of Quicken no longer have the QIF Import features! Somehow Intuit decided to change file formats a couple of years ago and also start charging banks to use their new format, also making it harder for people to switch to MS Money. Yeah, that's a good way to piss off all of your existing customers! (not that Microsoft or MS Money is any better since MS Money will stop performing electronic statement imports unless you upgrade every 2 years).

OK, so we go into MS Money and export to QIF. Go into Quicken and Import from QIF. Gee, the balance is wrong. It dropped several transfer transactions! You'd think that financial software would be a bit more careful about dropping transactions for no reason.

Well, the support guy can't figure this out. He concludes that it is impossible to import my MS Money data into Quicken. In the quality survey after the call they ask how likely you are to recommend Quicken to your friends on a scale of 0 (would never recommend) or 10 (love it). I answer zero of course. I'd never use Quicken if I could ever avoid it. And I'm really nervous about using Quickbooks because it's from the same company. I actually called my accountant to confirm that I really needed Quickbooks and that she will charge me less for preparing my taxes if I use Quickbooks.

OK fine. But I'm smarter than a stupid computer...there *must* be a way to fix this!

When importing a QIF file into Quicken, there is an option called "Special Transfer Handling". After playing with this option, it seems to work like this:

If the Special Handling flag is on, then when you import a Transfer (from Account A to Account B, for example), Quicken tries to be really smart and locate the matching transaction in Account B and link them together. But if it fails to find a match (because the other account hasn't been imported yet!) then it stupidly neglects to enter the transaction into Account A (the one you are importing). This causes transfers to be dropped and makes the account balance wrong.

If the Special Handling flag is off, then when you import it automatically creates a matching transaction in Account B. Of course, if Account B has already been imported, this causes a duplicate transaction to be created. So this option messes up the balance of Account B. Still a problem.

But I figured out a nice kludge that allowed all of this to work. Before Importing any QIF files, I go into Quicken and change the name of all of the accounts (just added the number 1 to the end of each name). Now, when I import with the Special Handling Off, Quicken tries to create a transaction for the other account, but it can't find the other account, so it doesn't get created. Fortunately, because the Special Handling is off, it still creates the original transaction in the account we are importing.

So, the result is that all transactions are converted to normal deposits or withdrawals and are no longer linked with any matching transactions in another account. But for archival data, that is just fine. The important result is that it imports all of the transactions and that the account balances remain correct.

I posted this solution over in the Quickbooks forum. I'm amazed that nobody else has ever come up with this before, or at least never posted it. Importing MS Money into Quickbooks is a pretty common topic on their forums, and none of the answers are of any help. Most of the answers just tell you to search Google and find a service that will convert the data for you (which is *way* too expensive for a small business like mine).

All of that took about 4 days. But maybe my experience will help someone else in the future who need to use Quickbooks.

What was really amazing about all of this was how hard this was. I still can't get over the fact that Intuit makes it so hard to migrate from a competing product. In the Western world we promote competition as one of the best ways to improve a product. With Microsoft and Intuit in such fierce competition for more than six years on financial software, you'd think that the resulting products would be amazing. But no...what is amazing is how *low* the customer satisfaction with *both* Quicken and MS Money is. Look at Amazon ratings, or CNET ratings. People hate both Quicken and MS Money. People hate the business decisions being made by Intuit and Microsoft to try and get more of their money.

You can't even buy a decent version anymore. The "basic" versions that are cheap don't do what you need in many cases, especially with online transactions. And if you don't keep paying for upgrades, features in your product stop working. And, at least in this case, support for Quicken is a joke.

No, I'm not going to write my own. I've learned my lesson about that ;) In fact, Intuit and Microsoft have driven the market to the point where is it very hard to compete. Peachtree and MYOB still have a market, but it's small for the personal finance software. And Quickbooks has a huge share of the business market. Microsoft recently released a product to compete with Quickbooks (they bought Great Plains software), but from what I have read, the new Microsoft software doesn't even have a way to import from MS Money yet. Pretty bad when you aren't even compatible with your own companies product!

How does this happen? How does a product market that is *so* important become so messed up? I could talk a lot about the lack of quality in the world, but I've already ranted about that in other blogs. Lack of quality control, poor business decisions, business decisions that alienate your existing customer base. Wow, what a mess.

Anyway, I've got everything in Quickbooks now, so at least my accountant should be happy. Now I can start programming again.

GURU Joined: 23 Dec 2000 Posts: 4834 Location: USA

Posted: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:05 pm

Whatever happened to Sage?

Posted: Wed Jan 11, 2006 6:42 pm

Actually, I was talking more about the personal finance software market, rather than the business market. I know that in business there are usually people double-checking everything. But what about the individual that uses Quicken or MS Money and just assumes that it's all correct.

I guess the problems that I encountered only effects people changing between products. So if most people just stick with whatever they have and don't try to switch to the other product, then they might be fine.

But given the frustrated user comments (like the ones on Amazon), you'd think that each company would try to make their product work better at converting the competitor's files. If either one of the products could get better, or if either one of the companies would stop making business changes that annoy their customers, then one of the products could really dominate the market.

Maybe they just aren't making enough money from the consumer market to care about it, but that seems unlikely.

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

This reminds me about that FAT patent issue some time ago if I remember it correctly. This is really a data structure and that is exactly what file formats are as well. Could Microsoft simply patent their products' file formats to prevent competitors to import data from them? Perhaps they already have?

Adept Joined: 12 Nov 2000 Posts: 268 Location: Canada

Jeez Zugg..

I've been trying to move from Microsoft Money to Quicken XG for a while now, and it just won't let me...I have categories and subcategories whose names are too long, and it just fubars the whole gosh darned thing. After after legitimatly spending 35$ on Quicken XG, I've gone back to my borrowed copy of MSN Money 2005. Intuit definatly lost a customer, and unfortunatly for me, I can't get my taxes done in M$ Money, because the quebec tax rules aren't anywhere to be found.

Oh well..i'll just wait till you make a personal finance program ;)

Magician Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 459 Location: USA