MS Money File Conversion

[Howard]

Recently purchased this product as my 20+ year old version of MS Money stopped working after Microsoft applied a .NET patch.
Managed to get it working again by upgrading to MS Money 2005 so I'm still using it and hoping this product will evolve into something as good, or better, than MS Money.
Are there any plans to come up with a full conversion for an existing MS Money file which can be loaded into Maxim Money ?
Please don't suggest exporting / importing as QIF format as it's absolutely useless - not only does it completely lose any customised reports,
share price history etc, if you've ever used 'transfer' transactions is produces duplicate entries in accounts.
The Microsoft method to sort this out is to manually delete the spurious entries - as I've got over 20 years worth of data that's a non starter.

[Campbell]

Hi Howard. This is definitely high up on my wish list, and I have looked at it several times before. The difficulty is that Microsoft used a proprietary file format, which was based upon a Microsoft Access (yuck!) database structure. However, they changed the encryption methods between versions, and so whilst it's reasonably likely that I'll be able to write a direct importer for earlier versions of MS Money, it is less likely that it will be possible for later versions.

At the moment, however, I am concentrating more on creating core features for Maxim Money, such as improving the reporting.

Regarding the manual transfer (exporting and importing), I appreciate your concerns about losing reports and price history. The latter can most likely be solved if I add the ability to load historic prices. I can't see a solution to the former in terms of transferring the data, but the next version of Maxim Money (to be released in the next week or two) will have substantially better reporting capability, with a set of default reports, so this may make things a little easier in terms of transferring.

[Campbell]

Also regarding transfer transactions creating duplicates, that shouldn’t happen if the details match up in both account. If that is happening for you, please let me know and I will look into this further.

[Howard]

Thanks for getting back so promptly.
Yes, the Transfers do screw up balances, as the Transfer To entry seems to get reposted (again) to the Transfer From account.
There are quite a few comments about that scenario.
On the other hand I've managed to get my MSMoney file converted to MS Access but can't open it as MS Access requests a password.
Tried a repair using Stellar software which allows me to view the tables - but wants to charge to save the file, I'm still looking for
some freeware.
Looking at the MSMoney table structure it looks like it was designed by someone who has zero knowledge of relational databases.
If I can get access it should be fairly straighforward to reformat everything into whatever output is required.

[Howard]

Managed to find a couple of bits of freeware which converts MSMoney.mny files to an MSAccess mdb file and then reverse engineers the table data with a series of queries. This allows the extract of Share Price History, Regular Bills / Deposits, Categories, Payees, transactions, Organisations, Accounts etc etc.
The results (from MSAccess) can be saved in a spreadsheet and uploaded into whatever database you're using.
There's a huge amount of work been done on this and I'm looking at the results from my money file - all seems to balance correctly with no
information loss.
By far the biggest table (in terms of rows) is the one holding the Share Prices - I'd guess this is from when MSMoney used to update
automatically some years ago.
I'm sure that some of the data is still obfuscated, but it very much depends on exactly what information Maxim Money holds as to whether or
not this is a problem.
What database do you use as a backend ?

[Campbell]

It looks like I may have had a major breakthrough with this! I obviously need to spend some more time on it, but there is now a real possibility that I might be able to get MNY files importing directly into Maxim Money!

[Campbell]

Well, I think I have managed to get this working. I'm very keen to hear whether this works on your own data files. I have only been able to test this on a couple of data files, so please let me know whether you have any problems.

• Does the MNY file import at all?
• Do all your account totals match Microsoft Money?
• Are all investment transactions supported?
• Are all your scheduled transactions correct?

The data in the Microsoft Money data files, to be honest, is a total mess, and it's been quite a challenge working out what and where to import. So please let me know if anything is not correct, and if possible please send me a sample of anything that hasn't imported correctly.

Unfortunately, due to the number of libraries required, the download size has increased around 40%.

[Neill]

quick test here, im currently still maintaining both MM and MSM files

I loaded my MSM file in MM and it matches exactly what I see in MSM
so looks very promising so far

[jjb]

Just tried importing my old MS Money file and it failed with...

image.png (29.65 KiB) Viewed 1076 times

The account list is complete but shows all accounts with a zero balance despite appear to have all the actual account entries (including some that Money was failing to display which was the reason I finally got round to moving away from it!).

The investment portfolios are all showing but are empty.

[Campbell]

Ok, thanks. I will see if I'm able to reproduce at all. If not, I might need to come back to you for a sample.