Published Aug 5, 2004
It’s harder than one thinks it might be to import your Macintosh Quicken file into your new Windows version of Quicken. Among other challenges, Quicken support uses the word “convert” rather than “import”, which makes it harder to search for the right article.
There is, however, a right article, and it gives good advice. The export process is, briefly, as follows:
- Set your Mac to use four-digit years, and restart
- Un-hide any hidden accounts
- Explort a .qif file from your Mac
- Import the .qif file into your PC, confirming a lot of transactions
- Re-enter all scheduled transactions, because they will have been lost
This will get you all your info, more-or-less whole. Step 1 is surprising; I would have expected that Quicken would have used 4-digit dates internally, at least, for additional precision. If you fail to carry out step 1, as I did the first time, all of your imported transactions from, say, 2004 will be listed as having taken place in 1904. Not convenient, and, again, surprising; a basic sanity check of dates on import would safely eliminate transactions from 100 years ago, I would think.
This list is not complete, however, at least not if you’re like me. When I went to reconcile one of my accounts — one that had always been reconciled successfully on the Mac — I ended up being off by $35,000. Nothing I could do would convince Quicken to use the right starting balance so that the reconciliation could come out correct. I ended up letting Quicken enter an adjustment; I reconciled the next month, too (I’d taken off a month, you know, vacation), and that turned out fine, so I just deleted the adjustment and the trial balance turned out fine. We’ll see if that holds up. If it doesn’t, my advice for importing from Quicken Mac into Quicken Windows will be: use Microsoft Money.
I have no need for the knowledge you are providing mac converts with, but I will take this forum to say the picture of the doggie on your moblog from 8/7 is damn cute.