Suggestions

[micax]

Hi,

Have used Acemoney for many years - glad it is still being maintained. Unfortunately, I live outside the US, so a lot of its smarter features are near useless to me - none of the banks I use support qif, ofx, or other formats of that type, mortgage calculations are off, the former investments portfolio thing resulted in some weird returns. It is still the best personal accounting system available for us outside of the US, IMO.

However, there are a couple of things which have annoyed me (and which IMO would improve usability quite a bit) over the last few years.

1) More powerful CSV imports.

CSV is the one format that pretty much every bank supports. But I use different banks, and each bank has its own format (some have debit and credit columns, some have one colum, some use minus in the debit, etc). It would make my life so much easier if I could specify how to import the files in Acemoney, instead of having to manually reorganize and re-format each file every time I want to add transactions. ideally, allow me to create and save templates for import.

And while we're on the subject of CSV:

2) Provide useful feedback when an import fails.

Currently what you get is nothing (all you see is that no import was made), leaving you to guess what the problem might be.

3) Better handling of transfers

I don't think I'm alone in having lots of accounts - CC accounts, savings accounts, mortgage account, common account with the wife, etc. That means that there is a lot of money getting transferred around between the accounts. However, the handling of transfers is very primitive.

a) Setting a transaction to transfer deletes the payee information of the transaction. This is unfortunate, as this is often useful info. Would be nice if this info could be moved to comment or otherwise preserved without manual effort.

b) Duplicates are created when converted manually. It should not be terribly difficult to look at the "receiving" account, checking if there is a corresponding transaction and asking whether it is the parallel transaction for the transfer.

c) Batch conversion of transactions to transfers is impossible. This is seriously annoying when reconciling transactions for a lengthy time period.

Finally, what I'd really love to have:

d) Import rules for transfers. Most transfers have unique payee descriptions - it would be nice if one could set up import rules so that certain transactions are automatically converted to transfers (though - of course - one must of course keep an eye on duplicates).

Just my 50 cents.

[RLebeau]

However, there are a couple of things which have annoyed me (and which IMO would improve usability quite a bit) over the last few years.

This is a peer support forum. Feature requests need to be submitted to MechCAD Support directly.

1) More powerful CSV imports.

CSV is the one format that pretty much every bank supports. But I use different banks, and each bank has its own format (some have debit and credit columns, some have one colum, some use minus in the debit, etc). It would make my life so much easier if I could specify how to import the files in Acemoney, instead of having to manually reorganize and re-format each file every time I want to add transactions. ideally, allow me to create and save templates for import.

Have you seen this KnowledgeBase article on the MechCAD Support website yet?

My bank only supports CSV format (comma separated values). Can AceMoney handle this file type?

2) Provide useful feedback when an import fails.

Currently what you get is nothing (all you see is that no import was made), leaving you to guess what the problem might be.

There are other areas of AceMoney that would benefit from better error reporting in general. Downloading transactions over OFX (direct connect) definitely needs it. Most error messages (if any) reported during downloads are useless.

3) Better handling of transfers

I don't think I'm alone in having lots of accounts - CC accounts, savings accounts, mortgage account, common account with the wife, etc. That means that there is a lot of money getting transferred around between the accounts. However, the handling of transfers is very primitive.

a) Setting a transaction to transfer deletes the payee information of the transaction. This is unfortunate, as this is often useful info. Would be nice if this info could be moved to comment or otherwise preserved without manual effort.

Why would a transfer between accounts need a Payee? What is a use-case for that?

b) Duplicates are created when converted manually. It should not be terribly difficult to look at the "receiving" account, checking if there is a corresponding transaction and asking whether it is the parallel transaction for the transfer.

Detection of transfers during imports/downloads was promised years ago, and never delivered.

c) Batch conversion of transactions to transfers is impossible. This is seriously annoying when reconciling transactions for a lengthy time period.

You mean like: Select a group of transactions, right-click, choose "Convert to transfer", choose target account, done?

d) Import rules for transfers. Most transfers have unique payee descriptions - it would be nice if one could set up import rules so that certain transactions are automatically converted to transfers (though - of course - one must of course keep an eye on duplicates).

Import rules in general need a major overhaul, IMHO. They are too primitive, not very flexible at all.

[micax]

Agreed.

Thanks for the response. I'll post to the direct support forums, then.