MS Money to Quicken Mac?

[hauntedcity]

I'd love to move my financial software from a Windows computer to my new MBP, and I'm trying to wrap my head around the options.

Is it possible to transfer data from MS Money to Quicken 2007 for the Mac? I've looked at Quicken's website, which says it is possible, but then it links to a Windows-only converter program. I'm not all that impressed with the Quicken Mac reviews, but I want something that can stay synched with my Palm. I'm currently using Ultrasoft Money to link up to MS Money on an XP computer.

If that won't work, here's a crazy question... Could I run Money in Parallels, and have the Palm sync up with that? I don't think that will work, because I'd like to have all the other Palm apps sync up with OSX, and I doubt you could split the sync between XP and OS X file systems, but it rarely hurts to ask...

Thanks,
Doug

 

[CnoteMD]

I went through the same problem when I switched from PC to Mac a month or so ago. MS Money was one of the best financial software programs I had while using a PC. Unfortunately, it was a complete nightmare trying to convert my MS Money file to Quicken for Mac.

I followed instructions from Quicken on exporting each individual account in MS Money to a QIF file. But this severely limits the number of characters in the name of any account or category. Very quickly, I found this method to be useless.

Then I used a Windows program to convert my MS Money file to a Quicken for Windows file. You would think that the Quicken for Windows file would be easier to convert to a Quicken for Mac file...WRONG. Once again, I spent a significant amount of time creating another essentially useless file (as least as far as Quicken for Mac was concerned).

Ultimately, I started a new account from scratch and simply downloaded the last year or so worth of transactions from each financial institution online. This resulted in a loss of about 2-3 prior years worth of transactions, and required a few hours of accurately setting up all of the different transfers between accounts, but I figured this would be a one time issue. I don't plan on ever going back to a PC, so at least one good thing has come out of this process.

In the end, I still prefer MS Money, but Quicken for Mac still shows good compatibility with all of my financial institutions and allows me to stay organized with little effort.