After more than twenty years of using Quicken for our household accounts, even after the 2006 issue proved to be the last for European customers, I decided enough was enough and I should make an effort to move into the modern age. I thought I must be one of the last dinosaurs, but since so many current budgeting programs give help for migrating Quicken users, accepting their data as HAZ files, there must be plenty of us still roaming around.

So which to choose? I initially picked Home Accountz v3 — and found myself struggling in a bog of trouble. I had that solid rock of support, Rob, at my back to help me import my old files, but straightaway even he had surprises: for instance, we had to import all accounts, the data files, in one go, regardless of whether we still wanted them or not, nor could we use one as a trial run.

In setting up my imported files, my biggest mistake was to assume the account names (eg “Credit card”) implied a group description into which your individual accounts would fit, so I entered all of them under that title. As a result, my three credit card accounts, for instance, all merged into the one “Credit card” account, and our two ISAs became one “Savings” account, so I had to delete them all and start again, entering them as separate files in their own right. Then I was foxed by the fact that the Balances columns bore no relation to either the imported data or bank statements, in spite of all of them being reconciled in the past. (More of that later…)

Standing Orders were Automated Transactions, operated as Recurring Transactions, which I found best to enter manually as automated, and definitely not to “Enter Now”. But all these were just minor details compared with trying to use the program at all.

For a start, it was not just agonisingly slow, but repeatedly stuttered to a complete halt. It was impossible to know when it was simply thinking very, very, slowly or had given up altogether. I was always having to start again. Was it me, was it my computer? Rob downloaded it and had a go in his lab, and lo, it crashed his computer! At that point, I gave up.

Rob did some searching around for me (bless him) and found Home Accounts 4, from EZPZ software, and — mostly — it’s been bliss. It is simple, perfect for domestic use. It has a massive (117 pages) User Guide, which, being anxious and cautious, I printed out, and it is one of the most comprehensive and helpfully accessible guides of any program I’ve come across. You can also use their forum, or even personally email for help, which their advice-guy, John Beachill, answers impressively quickly.

We were able to import only what we wanted, it was easy to set up accounts, and to work with them. BUT. I’ve met the same old problem of weird balances, which seem calculated utterly anew from the original file, in spite of all the contributing data coming through exactly. Since our accounts date from the beginning of time, the total figures are gigantic. I was so puzzled by the first bank account I examined that I simply turned it into a dormant one, and started again from the current date with an opening balance. Then I realised that some at least of the problem might lie in the fact that transferred transactions (for example, paying into a credit card account from a current account) were omitted. Why? They were all there in the imported data. When importing accounts I had carefully not ticked any entries that had been marked as duplicates — had I got that wrong?

I searched the users’ forum without success, so I asked for help. John replied: “When importing transactions the file contains the transactions for a single bank account. If there are bank to bank transfers involved then these would be added from the first file and should then not need to be duplicated when transactions for the other bank account involved in such transfers are imported. So no, you weren’t wrong to untick the duplicates.”

That didn’t really help, so I repeated that no transfers seemed to have gone through, and got this advice: “I see, so none of the transfers between accounts have been imported. Did our software fail to pick them up or did you not tick them to include them?

“Make a backup in case you need to go back to your current position. Try importing again from the same file. Transactions that have already been imported should come up as matched to reduce the risk of importing them twice. Concentrate on any transfers you spot. Based on the account you are importing the transactions into, think about whether the transfer will be paid in or out for the bank account. You should then be able to select the other bank account, assuming it already exists, from the Category dropdown. You can then just tick those transfers and import them.”

Simple, yes? I offer this to anyone who has the same problem, but at the moment, I can’t face re-importing everything. It may be lazy, but for purely personal, domestic records, it seems to me easier to repeat my first solution, and start the accounts again with a correct opening balance. I won’t have lost any information other than balances (dates, what bought where, memos etc), and that’s my only reason for looking back.

It’s still a mystery to me why both the programs provided weird balances (because presumably other people must be managing all right!) But apart from this, I’m quite happy to battle on with Home Accounts. Wish me luck.

The lovely chap who runs RLS Computer Services seems to think a few notes on the journey taken by an ordinary, non-expert PC user, while coming to grips with Windows 8.1 in a new computer, might be of interest to someone. So here goes.

Some of the changes still strike me as bizarre. Why do we have pretty pictures in boxes (yes, I know — apps) lurking in a “Start” that in my mind actually feels not like a start area but somewhere in the back of my computer, instead of plain old program names listed easily where one can see them? Even now I haven’t found an “All Programs” (surely it’s somewhere?) although the Windows Help pages assume there is still an initial “Start > All programs” instruction.

Most of my problems are due to my being blind or silly, and I solve them eventually myself. The “Mail” email program was a pain — for example I couldn’t print an excerpt, only a whole email — so we swapped that for “Windows Live Mail”. At first I raged against the loss of the old “address book”, and fought my way through the complicated process of searching, editing, copying (I couldn’t) addresses through “Start > People” etc , until one day I suddenly realised “Contacts” was right there on the bottom left of my screen. Duh. On the other hand, so is “Recovered items” — and that baffles me. I had been thrilled to find it: occasionally while writing an email I have touched something mysterious (I’ve never known what) and the whole thing has vanished in a flash. Gone! Where? Aha, maybe this is where I can find it, except that there are only files with a date and a strange number that I can’t see a way to open. I’ve combed through the online Help sites without success — so far.

Similarly, I missed having the old “Undo” arrow, until discovering I should know about Ctrl+Z. But why not simply include it in the quick access toolbar? I can no longer prompt Send or Receive, but have to wait for the program to do it. What is the difference between “Sent” and “Sent items”? Is “Sent” the old Outbox? And what is “Trash” versus “Junk”? Is Trash something I should be using for my own purposes? These seem to be questions that are too simple to appear on help pages. But some of us are simple.

A newcomer will probably find their way easily through all this “progress”, but to us older users (who have managed to evolve from manual typewriters through an awful lot of changes that would once have seemed pure magic) some of the innovations feel more, not less, complicated. For example, when copying from a removable disk I always end up using “location of choice” because I now find it hard to pin down the particular folder I want in my PC Documents and not in “OneDrive”, where it always wants to go. And why can I no longer see an option to send (or cut or copy) a web page, either as a page or a link?

I’ll get there. Many changes are rather nice: the layers of mail pages at the bottom of the screen, the panel that floats in from the top corner (if you get your cursor just right) that allows you quick access to help on the web. It’s just that there are moments when I spend more time working out how to tackle a detail than actually getting the job done…

 

Mrs S Hamilton, King’s Lynn