You Brute!

I mentioned a few days ago that I'd found a product called MoneyDance, which is an inexpensive and pretty full-featured personal financial management system. We tried to make it fit into the way we do our planning and tracking, but it didn't quite work. (Think of this as a small-scale example of why Enterprise Resource Planning so often fails -- only, big time.) We were comfortable with Quicken, old and kludgy as it was. But how to make it work?

We found that we could use MD to take in the QIF file which contained all of our Quicken data, and then turn around and tell MD to create an extract -- just the last two years -- in QIF format. This was good. But when I took the extract into Quicken, the date format was junk -- it would show up as 5/30'20, not 5/30/06. I tried going into the file with Notepad, on the assumption that it was reading just the first two characters of the year, and changed them from 2006 to 06 -- but that didn't fix that apostrophe -- it still showed up as 5/30'06. If you entered the date, it was right, though.

So -- I just spent half an hour tabbing through every check, deposit, and transfer in my checking account for the last two year -- tab two to the right, backspace three characters, paste '/06', next line -- and now they're right. I hate brute force fixes -- but sometimes, its the only way.