QIF (from MS MONEY) issues

MMEX4Desktop, incl. Windows, macOS (10.10 or newer), and Most Unix variants using the GTK+ toolkit

Moderator: Renato

lbit
New MMEX User
Posts: 7
Joined: Sun Jan 08, 2017 8:22 am
Are you a spam bot?: No

QIF (from MS MONEY) issues

Post by lbit »

I'm trying to move all my MS Money data, about 10k transactions, to MoneyManagerEX.
I've found the following issues with QIF import:
1. MS Money exports in some ASCII latin codepage (being Italian I've several accented chars like àèìù...), while MMEX expects UTF-8. Not a big deal (I just need to convert to utf-8 before import) though a bit inconvenient
2. MMEX cannot import the "Opening balance" transaction. Not a big deal (I need to edit the account properties after importing and enter opening balance manually) though a bit inconvenient
3. Most (all?) transfer transaction are imported wrongly, eg. this is a MS Money transfer transaction from a bank account to a cash account, when exporting the cash account:
^
D04/12'2006
CX
T50.00
L[Fineco]
^
so this is transfer of 50 euro exiting from bank [Fineco] and entering to cash account. MMEX imports this as an outgoing transfer from the cash account (reducing the cash account balance, instead of increasing it). WRONG. MS Money exports outgoing transfers as negative values, and incoming transfers as positive values. This is positive so INCOMING.
4. Transaction state (reconciled, etc..) is not imported (e.g. the CX line in the QIF transaction show above here).

At the moment I'm stuck at issues 3 and 4.
Do you know any way to work around these?
Nikolay
MMEX Developer
Posts: 1535
Joined: Sat Dec 06, 2008 2:27 pm
Are you a spam bot?: No
Location: Sankt-Petersburg, Russia

Re: QIF (from MS MONEY) issues

Post by Nikolay »

Nikolay
MMEX Developer
Posts: 1535
Joined: Sat Dec 06, 2008 2:27 pm
Are you a spam bot?: No
Location: Sankt-Petersburg, Russia

Re: QIF (from MS MONEY) issues

Post by Nikolay »

 Now  fixed builds are available here:
https://ci.appveyor.com/project/guanlis ... ld/1.3.442

More details here:
https://github.com/moneymanagerex/money ... mmex-build

Fixed issues 1,3,4
lbit
New MMEX User
Posts: 7
Joined: Sun Jan 08, 2017 8:22 am
Are you a spam bot?: No

Re: QIF (from MS MONEY) issues

Post by lbit »

Excellent!!! Thanks.
So this is what I see now.

1. Fixed OK
2. Still open but not very important
3. Fixed
However I still cannot easily import MSMoney QIFs. Suppose I have Acccount A and Account B with some transfers between A and B.
I export account A from MS Money and import it in MMEX. Everything is fine and transfers are correct. I see the transfer transactions both in Account A and in Account B.
Then I export Account B from MS Money and import it in MMEX. Still import is OK, transfers OK, but now all transfers are duplicated (imported once from Account A's QIF and once from Account B's QIF). Also there seem to be no way to filter them out and delete easily.
4. Fixed. Reconciled flag imported OK. This is good enough for me.
However for completeness, here is some more info.
MSMoney has 3 possible states: (Unreconciled, Cleared, Reconciled) and 1 flag: Void. I'm not sure how the void flag is used (probably it just flags the transaction as something to be completely ignored)
In QIF the state is exported like this:

nothing for unreconciled
C* for cleared
CX for reconciled

The void flag is exported in the Payee field,eventually  adding VOID in front of the Payee as in:
^
D28/01'2005
C*
T0.00
PVOID Dix
LGroceries
^

I don't use the VOID flag nor cleared state ("cleared" is used when Balancing an account, for transactions that have been verified but when reconciliation has not yet been completed -  when reconciliation is comlpeted, cleared transactions are set to "reconciled") so I'm ok.
Nikolay
MMEX Developer
Posts: 1535
Joined: Sat Dec 06, 2008 2:27 pm
Are you a spam bot?: No
Location: Sankt-Petersburg, Russia

Re: QIF (from MS MONEY) issues

Post by Nikolay »

Is it posible to export both accounts a & b at the same time?
Or join both QIF files but it should be header with account names.
Sample:

Code: Select all

!Account
NSecond
TBank
D[EUR]
^
!Type:Cash
D2017-01-09
T-100.00
PTest
N123
L[Test]
MTransfer 100 from Second to Test
^
!Account
NTest
TBank
D[EUR]
^
!Type:Cash
D2017-01-09
T100.00
PTest
N123
L[Second]
MTransfer 100 from Second to Test
^
PS I don't understand 'cleared' status. There is no analog in mmex.
lbit
New MMEX User
Posts: 7
Joined: Sun Jan 08, 2017 8:22 am
Are you a spam bot?: No

Re: QIF (from MS MONEY) issues

Post by lbit »

MSMoney can only export a single account at the time (besides, even exporting multiple ones, transfers might appear under both accounts).
Other programs (e.g. moneydance) also import them singularly, but automatically ignore duplicate transactions when importing, thus solving the double transfers issue.

This is how cleared transactions work. All transactions of previous periods are flagged as reconciled.
Then you start with all transactions in current period as unreconciled, take the statement from the bank and start reconciling.
While reconciling, you flag transactions that match those in the statement and they are flagged cleared.
If you end up with the same final balance as in the statement you are ok, and all transactions are flagged reconciled.
If you end up with a difference wrt the statement, you are left with all your transactions as "cleared".
So you can distinguish between "reconciled" transactions that are those already verified from previous periods and confirmed ok, and Cleared transactions that are those matching the statement of the current period but since there is still some mistake in current period, they are not really "reconciled" as a whole.
I think the idea is to not mix transactions that are "fully" reconciled (matching a statement from a previous period), and those that are being reconciled but where reconciliation is still not completed.
This makes it easier to suspend the reconciliation and resume it at a later time and still distinguish transactions that are involved in the reconciliation (cleared or unreconciled) and those that are not (reconciled, because already confirmed in the past).
Nikolay
MMEX Developer
Posts: 1535
Joined: Sat Dec 06, 2008 2:27 pm
Are you a spam bot?: No
Location: Sankt-Petersburg, Russia

Re: QIF (from MS MONEY) issues

Post by Nikolay »

lbit
New MMEX User
Posts: 7
Joined: Sun Jan 08, 2017 8:22 am
Are you a spam bot?: No

Re: QIF (from MS MONEY) issues

Post by lbit »

Another quick way around the issue of duplicated transfers could be to skip importing all transfer transactions with a negative value (thus OUTGOING).
Since every transfer transaction appears twice, once with a negative value in the QIF of the source account and once with a positive value in the QIF of the destination account, after importing both QIFs everything should be correct

However this might be a bit risky and could raise questions about why some transactions are not imported....unless the UI has e.g. a flag to enable/disable this behavior.
The apparently more complex solution of identifying duplicate transfer transactions and avoid importing them twice, would probably be still better though.
Nikolay
MMEX Developer
Posts: 1535
Joined: Sat Dec 06, 2008 2:27 pm
Are you a spam bot?: No
Location: Sankt-Petersburg, Russia

Re: QIF (from MS MONEY) issues

Post by Nikolay »

Could you please try new daily build? 

PS I've added some code to check if transfer transaction is already exist. But in case if some performance degradation - I'll use your idea. Becouse just skip OUTGOINGs is more easy.

https://github.com/moneymanagerex/money ... mmex-build
lbit
New MMEX User
Posts: 7
Joined: Sun Jan 08, 2017 8:22 am
Are you a spam bot?: No

Re: QIF (from MS MONEY) issues

Post by lbit »

Hi
I retried importing my MSMoney data with latest build 450.
Better now but still not getting correct balances.
Transfers are just marked as duplicated, not skipped. So, after importing QIFs, I need to filter all duplicate transactions and delete them (mmh, ok).
Still I have several transactions not correctly imported/flagged as dups.

1. Split transactions with multiple transfers, like
^
D06/02'2010
CX
T-474.44
PInterspar
L[Cassa Chiara]
S[Cassa Chiara]
ERimb TV Marisa
$-200.00
S[Cassa Livio]
ERimb TV Marisa
$-210.00
SGroceries
$-64.44
^

Which has opposite partial transfers both in QIF of account Cassa Chiara ($200) and QIF of account Cassa Livio ($210). These don't get flagged as duplicated correctly, so even deleting trans marked as duplicated leaves some dup transfers around (causing wrong final balance)

2. Account type is not imported. All imported QIFs creates accounts of type Bank even if QIF contains first line like:
!Type:Cash
(I'm not sure if "reallocating" the account afterwards has any bad consequence).

BTW: If I right click one transaction (and get the right-click contect menu), then choose nothing from that menu and right-click another transaction instead, the first transaction seems to stay selected. Is this expected?
Post Reply