I’ve been investigating a switch from gnucash to Moneydance. There’s no way to export data directly from gnucash. Fortunately, someone wrote a Java app that will parse the XML and produce a basic QIF export with your accounts and transactions.

Thus far, Moneydance has been able to handle downloading data using OFX for most of my accounts. For Chase, I had to enable OFX functionality through the Web site.

Update, October 18th. Moneydance has its own special bag of problems. Somehow I managed to get it to raise an exception when I try to save my datafile. That result is a corrupt file that cannot be opened. I created my accounts by using gnucashtoqif and then editing accordingly, so I may have started with some odd data. Only seems to happen when I import an OFX from my brokerage account, but only with this data set. It imports fine with a new Moneydance account set. Still, gives me a moment of pause.

The investment stuff isn’t polished yet. If you track a bunch of investments, you’ll find some things are missing and many things aren’t immediately obvious.

I also found the liability account was kind of hit and miss. I prefer the way Gnucash handles it. I had to fight with Moneydance to automatically add all the prior transactions for my loan. The first time, it seemed to be willing to add some, not all, of the transactions. When I created the liability again, I could find no way of forcing it to create past loan payments. Seems like some kind of a bug that I had to do it by hand for two years of data.

I’ve filed a couple of these issues with Moneydance’s Trac based ticket system.

For $30, you get what you pay for, I guess.

It’s a positive enough experience to move forward with it and not enough to enslave myself to Intuit’s Quicken and be forced to upgrade every N years to maintain access to online account syncing.

Plus, Moneydance actually offers QIF and XML export, so I can at least recover my data more easily than from Gnucash should I decide to move to something else. (What else…?)