Quicken migration strategy

[thboyd]

I'm considering what the best way to migrate from Quicken to iBank. I have 15 years worth of data in Quicken 2007. I imported all of it and it seemed to me that iBank was somewhat sluggish in performance. Since I'm really don't need the data from 10 or 15 years ago, I thought that if I could just import that last couple of years, my new iBank file would be cleaner and faster. Of course I would probably need all of the investment data in order to maintain cost basis information. Has anyone else done this-split the quicken file and just import the most recent part? Any suggestions or experiences would be appreciated.

Tom

[tstoeckel]

I just did the same thing. I too have 15+ of Quicken data but, realistically, I never reference back more than a few years so I decided to only import back to 1/1/2005. I just exported that date range from the different accounts in Quicken and, after importing into iBank, I went back to the various imported accounts and added a starting balance on 12/31/2004 to fix the final balance.

[Jason Staloff]

Sluggishness when the register shows a lot of transactions is a recognized issue, and we are working on performance improvements. In the near term, the least disruptive way to handle this may be to use the filter buttons at the bottom of the iBank screen: All, This Year, and Recent. You can define what you consider "Recent" in the iBank application preferences. On any occasion when you want access to your full account history, it's still right there. If that's sufficient to improve performance, the advantage is that it involves no structural changes or sacrifice of data availability for reporting or reference purposes.

If you prefer to instead just work with more recent transactions in your current file, you may still want to import the entirety of your Quicken data into a separate historical iBank file so you have it for reference. You may also want to zip (compress) the file to make it obvious that it's an archive and add the cut-off date to the filename so it's obvious what you're looking at when you reach for it a year from now.

Based on your specific workflow, your need for going back to the archive, and your comfort with managing multiple data files and formats, one of these approaches will probably be more appealing than the others.

Friendly reminder: please be sure you're making regular and reliable backups of your current and archival data; changing to a new software is a great time to double check your backup routine to make sure it includes everything you want and that you can restore from it.

[thboyd]

Jason,
Thanks for your reply. I decided to go ahead and import everything from Quicken. If I only imported the recent data, there were a lot of stranded transfers between my bank accounts and my investment accounts. It just look like too much trouble. Is it possible to archive the older transactions in iBank so that my active file is limited to the last 5 years or so?

I do hope that the next release of iBank will address the performance issue with a large number of transactions AND improve historical reporting for investment transactions. I think at this time it's the way that iBank handles investments that's keeping me from switching. I really like the way iBank handles the banking transactions and for the time being, though, I'm going to have to maintain both Quicken and iBank because of the investments.

Tom

[Jason Staloff]

Hi Tom,

We don't have a specific archiving feature, though that is a standing request and I'll add your vote to it in our tracking system. Most people archive by saving and renaming a copy of the old iBank data file, though this strategy is not without its shortcomings.

If you only import recent transactions, you'll have to use separate QIF files for each account. To avoid transfer duplications in this scenario, you'll want to create all the accounts ahead of time and name them exactly the same as they are in Quicken. Then the transfers should be handled correctly.

The starting balance is the other thing to watch out for if you only import some of your data from Quicken. By default, a new account in iBank has a single transaction called starting balance, whose balance is zero dollars. Unless you're able to import the entire history of transactions since you opened the account, your balance in iBank won't be right after the import.

To fix it, you need to set the starting balance to whatever the account balance was just prior to the earliest transaction you imported. You don't have to go searching for that number, you just need to enter the difference between your real balance and the wrong balance iBank shows.

Thanks for the feedback, and please do email our support department if you continue to have trouble importing.

All the best,