Migration from Microsoft Money not possible ?

[Pastingal]

I've been using the excellent Microsoft Money product for 32 years. I'm eager to migrate to MMEX for reasons it's not necessary to explain I suppose (old product, no longer supported and which could fail anytime). Unfortunately, it appears to me impossible to migrate my .mny database globaly.

I've tried doing so by migrating account files exporting / importing .qif files but I get so many duplicated records that it is not workable.

Are there plans to offer a real migration path ? As many Microsoft Money users I suppose, I would be ready to pay a reasonnable fee for it !

Thanks for your feed back and solution if any

Jean-Paul (from France)

[renato-mmex]

Maybe that will help: https://davidbolton.info/articles/migrate-quicken-to-money-manager-ex/

[Pastingal]

Hi Renato,

Thanks a lot for this interesting feed back. Considering the high number of transactions typed along more than 30 years, I’m likely not going to convert manually. Reading the document, I understand that coming from MS Money there is a difference as coming from quicken, since I have to export to QIF account per account and not per a set of accounts in one go as it’s seemingly possible to do from quicken. But that’s not the core problem. The core problem is duplicated transactions when they include transfers to another account.

Trying to look another way, in fact one should consider two levels of problems :

The first one is to ensure the capability of using a software when MS Money will no longer run on an up-to-date PC. Starting MMEX from scratch at that time is a solution.

The second one is to ensure the capability of reading the MS Money data base when MS Money will no longer run on an up-to-date PC. And this may not need necessarily to migrate the data base. The question would be limited to have a tool able to read the .mny file and to query it. Couldn’t that be relevant of an easier solution?

As I’m completely new to MMEX and to the forum, may be I bore you with my considerations …

Sincerely yours

Jean-Paul

De : Renato @.> Envoyé : samedi 21 septembre 2024 22:28 À : moneymanagerex/moneymanagerex @.> Cc : Pastingal @.>; Author @.> Objet : Re: [moneymanagerex/moneymanagerex] Migration from Microsoft Money not possible ? (Issue #6896)

Maybe that will help: https://davidbolton.info/articles/migrate-quicken-to-money-manager-ex/

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[renato-mmex]

https://filext.com/file-extension/MNY https://www.lifewire.com/mny-file-2621992

[jensb]

I feel your pain. I had >20 years of financial life in a Mac-only commercial application which I'm not using any more. I ended up writing my own converter script, thankfully their application used also a SQLite database (albeit with a different schema). I managed to do it - but it literally took me months, being able to work on it mainly late in the evenings.

MNY files are practically MS Access files with a mangled header. You may be able to open them directly with MS Access 2000, and if not, there are converters that will fix the headers.

But that's just half the story: then you'll have to figure out the database schema (i.e. what is in which table, how the tables are linked, what do the columns mean, etc) and write your own forms and reports to query it. And honestly, I wouldn't bet 30 years of transactions on YET another closed source application with an undocumented file format.

There's a lot of information in this (German) MS Money interactive FAQ, including a description of the tables inside the MNY database: https://money.gvogt.de/

[Pastingal]

Thanks so much for that information. It will secure my migration path. I've started using Money Manager in parallel with MS Money. I will do that till the end of this year in order to become familiar with Money Manager. On January 1st, I will restart with Money Manager and the December 31st MS Money accounts balance. And quit MS Money. Doing so, I will keep my more than 30 last years in MS Money and have the years to come in Money Manager. As far as I can see, MS Money still run on Win 11 PC's. And if ever it fails sometime, I have your recommendations to work it out using MS Access. May be in the meantime, new migration facilities will have appear. This will be much simpler than migrating a data base containg so many accounts, including stocks, loans, etc. Thanks for your help

Jean-Paul

[jensb]

You're welcome! In the long run, if you want to keep old apps alive, it may be worth looking at apps like Virtualbox which can run an entire virtual PC with its own OS parallel to your running system. This way you could theoretically keep using MS Money on an old Windows XP system practically forever, even if your computer really runs Windows 11, Linux, or even MacOS. See www.virtualbox.org for more details. It's free (OSS) too.

[Pastingal]

Thank you for the tip. Have a good day.