Macrotone Blogs

Macrotone blogs upon Joomla, our products and other matters.
Font size: +
3 minutes reading time (625 words)

Quicken UK Personal Finance Part 2

qw2k43In an earlier post on this subject, we earlier mentioned our experiences in starting to upgrade our UK version of Quicken. This continues with our discoveries with the US version.

Having managed to obtain a copy of the US 2015 version from one of our contacts in the United States, we tried installing it on a test machine.

The first problem was that it didn't like the fact that our test machine had the earlier UK version installed, so we uninstalled and installed the 2015 US version.  This went well but when we tried torun it it complained about our locale for NON-UNICODE programs and that it should be set to set to 'English (United States)'.  So we changed the locale and tried again.

This time it requires us to register the version.   Here comes the second problem in that one requires a US address to be able to register the program. OK we can do that, so using the address of our US contact we try and register.  Unfortunately we cannot get it to register. It also soon becomes apparent that because we are located in the UK, we cannot access the US Intuit site via a browser either.

Time for a review:   The classic way to get around the problem of access to a US site which is restricting itself to thier own country is to use a VPN (Virtual Private Network).  One such product is named 'Tunnelbear' which enables one to 'fool' the target web site to think that one is in the US (or UK).  This particular VPN has a 'free' option so we install this and manage to successfully register the product.

Now we try and read our 2004 UK Qdata file.  It immediately objects to the file and says that it cannot read non US files.

Searching the web we discover that this is also a 'well known' problem. It is suggested that an earlier version of the US version for 2004 is used to read the UK files.  We can obtain a version from the US Intuit web site and we install this. We then try to read our 'updated 2004 UK' QData file.  Again we get reported error saying it can not read non US files.  Perhaps we can use a QIF file, which is an export from our 2004 UK version.  This has mixed success.  First the accounts that get created by the Import are all set to use the US currency. We get around this by first just importing the accounts, then modifying them so that they have the UK currency.  Then we try importing the data again.  It states that it reads 15000 records but we can immediately see that the final account values are incorrect.  It is obvious that the import has not handled the transactions that are between the different accounts.  In addition the dates of the transactions it has imported are wrong in most cases.  A number (most?) seem to have dates with the year in the early part of the 20th centrury.  i.e 190x., and there appear to be a number of transactions missing.

Given the number of transactions we are dealing with it is going to be a long winded task to check, and change the incorrect transactions  and Import them it is back to the drawing board.

So time for another review.  We have our 2004 UK version working fine and it seems to handle all that we require, is it worth the pain in continuing.  The answer has to be a resound no, so for the time being we will stay as we are and perhaps, and I mean perhaps, we will look at it again later, but for now we will leave it as it is.

×
Stay Informed

When you subscribe to the blog, we will send you an e-mail when there are new updates on the site so you wouldn't miss them.

Speeding up site loading
Joomla 2.5.28 released
 
Go To Top

Joomla! Debug Console

Session

Profile Information

Memory Usage

Database Queries