Microsoft Money to GnuCash

23 December 2006

Update, 10 January 2008: I ended up going with KMyMoney. See "Moving from MS Money to KMyMoney". I had to give up classifications as described below, but still, KMyMoney is an excellent replacement for Money.

One of my bigger challenges with moving to GNU/Linux from Windows will be to migrate eleven years worth of MS Money data to GnuCash. (Apparently, GnuCash is the financial application to use, but please let me know if there are good alternatives to evaluate.)

With .QIF exports and imports, it may not be too excruciating to move the data, but I think getting the reports I want will be a challenge. I haven't fully explored GnuCash reports yet, but so far I don't see what I want.

I'm using classifications with MS Money and hope I'll be able to find something similar with GnuCash. For example, in the automobile category, I have gas, maintenance, and repair subcategories. Two classifications would be "1998 Saturn" and "2001 Honda." Then I can see what total spending is for a sub-category and also break it down by vehicle.

I think I can manage this with GnuCash because it looks like you can have any number of category levels, so maybe I'll have this:

automobile:gas:1998 Saturn
automobile:gas:2001 Honda
automobile:maintenance:1998 Saturn
automobile:maintenance:2001 Honda
automobile:repairs:1998 Saturn
automobile:repairs:2001 Honda

And then I need to figure out if I can get reports that let me mix and match the numbers. I don't use graphs so much as tables. I might want to see consolidated numbers:

                  2004     2005     2006    Total
Automobile
  gas             $900    $1100    $1400    $3400
  maintenance     $500     $378     $670    $1548
  repairs         $576     $279     $987    $1842

Total            $1976    $1757    $3057    $6790

Or by "classification":

2006             Saturn    Honda      Total
Automobile
  gas              $800      $600     $1400
  maintenance      $370      $300      $670
  repairs          $750      $237      $987

Total             $1920     $1137     $3057

by Scott Carpenter on 23 December 2006 at 8:12 pm
permalink | comments (2) | filed under free software
tagged: money, the move

Comments

Hi Scott, I'll be interested to hear in how you've managed with the migration from MS Money to Gnucash in the past 12 months.

I'm still on MS Money, even though I've had my MacBook for 18 months. I'm about to test-drive Gnucash, but I wasn't intending on transferring the 10 years of data I had - I just thought that would be too hard.

How did you get on?

Regards, Graeme

http://monkeymemoirs.com

Posted by mm on 1 January 2008 at 8:28 am

Hi, Graeme. It happens that this morning I'm mulling over whether to start using GnuCash or KMyMoney starting today.

I've decided I may not migrate my old data over to whatever app I start using. I'll just start with a new program in this new year, and do parallel entry with MS Money for a while (which I'm still running in WinXP under VirtualBox).

I can dump data from MS Money in to a spreadsheet with spending by payee/category/subcategory by year and that should be enough to satisfy my historical curiosity.

I'm sure that GnuCash is a solid program and if I invested the time it would work for me, but I'm struggling with the interface and the organization.

So I'm also looking at KMyMoney, which is organized more like MS Money or Quicken. It looks like it has a healthy community of developers and users around it, so I expect it will be around for a while.

I'm not sure if I have the time or ambition to learn and enter data into both programs for a while to figure out which one works best for me, so I'm dithering over the choice.

Posted by Scott Carpenter on 1 January 2008 at 9:54 am

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