On Dec 17, 2008, at 4:52 AM, Jaysen wrote: > Hey folks. Last night my wife and I decided to abandon Quicken (the > last Windows program I need for my personal life) in favor of > Moneywell and QuickBooks (business accountant will only bend so much) > or iBank. Moneywell is the front runner, but I have a few questions > that I would like answered before I actually buy. My plan is to be > exclusive with my new solution in 1//1/2009. Knowing how frustrating > new users can be I will try to find answers in previous posts and try > to make the posts shorter than this first one. Anyway… > > As a new user with 7 years of quicken data I am having a hard time > wrapping my head around the Moneywell simply buckets. As Kevin > comments several times it is a mind set. I am left with a decision to > import seven years of data or start over. My quick test show that to > make the historical data relevant I will need to re-categorize (re- > bucketize?) all the data. Umm… not happening, so I am opting for a > scratch start. > Hi Jaysen,
I actually liked the process of re-categorizing my 10 years of Quicken data. It spotlighted some big mistakes I was making in missing certain assignments and assigning other buckets wrong. I also saw that I had too many buckets (some categories three levels deep in Quicken). Merging buckets is very easy in the 1.4 release of MoneyWell. You just hold down the Option key as you drop one bucket onto another (without the Option key a new money flow is created). > Here is the question: Based on my initial use my current process has a > hitch when I download transactions from my bank if a manually entered > transaction has a split. Essentially the system can not correlate the > 2 transactions. Here is the example: > > • Manually enter pay check with split allocations of 3K into "Salary", > 500 into "Taxes" 200 into "insurance" and 300 into "Retirement". Total > deposit is only $2K. > • Go to bank and download QFX file. Import file > • I now have 2 x $2K deposits which inflates my balance. > Members of this forum have heard this one many times by me and if you hang around here, you'll no doubt hear it again. I usually suggest that people stop trying to break out their paychecks using split transactions. Here's my reasons. First, you don't have $3000 of cash flow coming into your account, you only have $2000 so why confuse the process by creating a $3000 transaction. This is why it's not matching up with your bank transaction that is being imported. It shows the actual cash flow amount of $2000 and yours in MoneyWell is $3000. Second, there is no need to track taxes and other breakouts on your paycheck because all that information is already broken out on your stub, totaled, and your given an end of year report as well. Repeating this process in MoneyWell is just busy work. If you want to track your retirement fund, just do that as a separate account with transactions of its own. > Other simple transaction like gas (Auto) which have only one bucket > assignment match just fine. If I eliminate the splits life is good. > The problem with this is that I am now not tracking some of the > expenses which vary a bit month to month. > But you will be tracking all your transactions that matter. Just remember to only track what really affects your cash flow (the net amount) and you'll be fine. > So the questions are: > Is this an issue in my thought process? It's an issue with the way Quicken has trained us. Instead of managing our cash flow and focusing on being better at spending and saving, Intuit taught us to spend more time messing with their software and entering all the gory details so we could link with their tax software and feel good about spending hours of extra time entering details throughout the year when we could have spent 10 minutes at the end of the year entering the 4 or 5 numbers from our W-2 forms. It's a bit of a racket actually. Your software should help you be better at the task you are doing, not better at the software itself. > > Should I not be downloading transactions (it breaks with groceries as > well) if I am manually entering them? Definitely. I do it all the time and MoneyWell will learn how to categorize these as you correct the imported transactions. After a few imports, the process becomes very smooth and quick. > > Is the preferred method to just mark the manual transaction as > "reconciled" and delete the download? > No, let MoneyWell match then and merge the transactions. Merging gives you the advantage of your manual naming with the storage of the original payee, memo, and bank specific ID numbers in the back end of the transactions. Just add aliases to your memorized transactions if they don't catch and update an imported transaction correctly. > Thanks for all your help. Please ask more questions if you need anything. I think you'll find MoneyWell much faster to work with than Quicken but you will have to change a few habits first. Peace, Kevin Hoctor No Thirst Software LLC [email protected] http://nothirst.com http://kevinhoctor.blogspot.com Check out our MoneyWell video tutorials: http://nothirst.com/moneywell/tutorials/ Join our user forum to learn about new releases: http://groups.google.com/group/no-thirst-software --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "No Thirst Software User Forum" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/no-thirst-software?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
