In my road away from Quicken, I’ve decided that the first potential Quicken for Mac 2007 replacement that I’ll evaluate is iBank.  Last night, I downloaded it and started the import process¹.

After I imported my data into iBank, I realized that it’s only importing one type of data: my account data, which includes the transactions associated with that account.  When I’ve been thinking about importing data, this is exactly the data that I have been considering and most worried about being imported correctly.  However, my account data is only one piece of data that I currently have stored in Quicken.

Scheduled transactions.  I have a lot of scheduled transactions.  The majority of these scheduled transactions are monthly, but there’s biannual (property taxes, auto insurance) and annual (home insurance, subscriptions) too.  Knowing the amount of these transactions (or approximate amount, for things that fluctuate) and date means that I know how much money I need to have available at any given time.

Budget.  Closely related to my scheduled transactions is the budget.  I always have a pretty good idea of how I’m doing compared to my budget.  The budget gets revisited about once per year, or more often if circumstances dictate.  Not seeing my budget really threw me off when I first launched iBank, although in retrospect I shouldn’t’ve been surprised.

Online account information.  Several, although not all, of my accounts have online access.  Quicken has stored my usernames and passwords so that it can automatically download new transactions.

For each of these, I’m going to have to manually reenter or recreate that data.  In retrospect, I shouldn’t be surprised.  When I had been thinking about importing my data, even though I had only been thinking about importing my account/transaction data, I had assumed that I would be able to do that step pretty quickly and then be up and running.  I’m going to have to invest more time to get started.

This isn’t a complaint.  It’s certainly safer that other applications can’t access my online account information.  It just shows that I hadn’t fully considered exactly what it would take to make a transition out of Quicken.