Tonight I was spending some time catching up on many (more than I care to mention) months’ worth of finances. A couple of accounts had significant transactions which needed entry into Quicken. Due to Intuit having disabled direct connection with my financial institution (because they want me to buy something newer than what I’d already paid them for), I was stuck with the prospect of having to enter many things by hand. Ugh!
Well, a bit of googling later, I came upon http://xl2qif.chez-alice.fr/calc2qif_en.php . This is an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet macro to convert csv data to QIF format. Unfortunately, Quicken 2007 will not support QIF import to bank accounts (yet another planned “feature” vs. it working successfully in a prior version) but there is a workaround… you can simply import the QIF into a “cash” account and then cut and paste the transactions over to the correct account from there.
It worked almost perfectly. I downloaded the csv files from my financial institution, opened them in OO Calc and then applied the macro to map and save the selected data to QIF for import into Quicken. The only issue was that I could not get the amounts of the transactions to import for some reason. In all fairness, it is late and I didn’t spend much time trying — it was much easier to just type the figures by hand into the otherwise complete entries. Way better than doing it all by hand!
This may be the final shove to move me to an open source finance program. Intuit’s business model of breaking SW features I’ve already paid for is problematic. This, coupled with the complete uselessness in the past few years of the Quicken to TurboTax import, takes the cake. I guess they can’t compete on new features alone? I would routinely and willingly pay for updates before, when features got better. But now that MS Money is dead as competition, I don’t expect things with them to get any better soon.