10th Anniversary?

[ideasguy]

Rather belatedly 
Bank Genie is now just over 10 years old.
I had a look last night and found the first copy went to a customer in November 2004.

In actual fact its 20 years or so since early design and use by yours truly
Its changed a bit since then

[Eric Hardy]

Well done, George. And remarkably useful it has been too. Don't worry about Barry, I understood what you meant to say 

Eric H

[ideasguy]

Ooops - yes, 2004 Barry, thanks for the correction!
Ive gone back and edited my posting.

Its good to know it was useful Eric Its been invaluable to me over the years.

[NightHawk]

Congratulations George 

[ideasguy]

Thanks Laurie

[barryl]

Totally agree about it being a useful product. I am running about 12 different datasets with it! George - is that a record?

[ideasguy]

I'd say it is Barry!
I didn't know you had THAT many

Wouldn't we both be surprised if someone came in and tells us of more

I knew you had at least one massive set where you had to merge three sets together to make one contiguous set with all data for that database. Perhaps you could explain that here to our members.

[barryl]

OK then!!

I have 12 Bank Genie datasets and one test dataset

Of these :
4 are for charities of which I am treasurer
4 are for university societies of which I am treasurer
2 are to do with my late mother's estate of which I am executor
and whose financial affairs I looked after in the last years of her life
1 is for the local community
and the last 1 is my own personal finances

my own finances is the most complicated (more below); of the rest
almost all are simple, having just one or two bank accounts but one
has seven bank accounts.

My own personal finances is the most complicated which is partly because I started
managing it online in 1993; I then used a package called I think PCmoney; this I then
migrated to Quicken and eventually to Bank Genie Pro 4. So my BG files have financial
records from 1993-2015 (the BG data has more than 21Mb).

Another complication is to do with credit cards and savings accounts which have come
and gone over the years, not to mention things like savings accounts for grandchildren,
with the result that there are something like 50 (!) bank accounts.

An additional complication is that Quicken 2000, which is the last version I ran is a 16
bit program, and whether because of that or other complications, once I had more than a
few years of data in the database it started to go extremely slowly. To make matters
worse going much beyond that would result in the system giving incorrect results or
crashing, so I had to split the data into several sets for different intervals of years.

Eventually I had data for 1993-1999; 2000-2007; 2008-2010 and 2011-now

These I needed to convert to bank genie, which I did in 2013 quite some time after
converting most of the easy datasets.

In order to do that I had to export the relevant quicken data for each account in the
1993-1999 dataset (20+ bank accounts) and import them into a new BG dataset; then do
the same for the 2000-2007 data importing into the existing dataset; then the 2008-2010
dataset and then finally the current dataset.

As might be imagined this did not go altogether smoothly (mainly finger trouble) and I
had to restart more than once. It certainly exercised the import from quicken code in
Bank genie :-)

I am of course extremely grateful to George for all the hard work he put in to create
BG4 Pro from BG3 (which was what I first played with) and for implementing all the
import from QIF files stuff which I know many users have benefitted from.

[ideasguy]

Many thanks for explaining that in such detail Barry! Now I know why your requirements were so exacting
All I knew was there were lots of quite different datasets to be imported.

RE:

In order to do that I had to export the relevant quicken data for each account in the
1993-1999 dataset (20+ bank accounts) and import them into a new BG dataset; then do
the same for the 2000-2007 data importing into the existing dataset; then the 2008-2010
dataset and then finally the current dataset.

If I may just ask for clarification - when finalised, did the development work we "tried and tested" allow you to merge all those fragmented datasets into one Bank Genie database?

RE:

...It certainly exercised the import from quicken code in Bank Genie :-)

Yes, developing that was fun
Those datasets had some complex transactions. Having dealt with them, the import program has dealt with anything thrown at it by all subsequent users.
Many thanks to you for all those test files and your countless hours testing my import program updates against them.

[barryl]

Indeed: all the development work did allow me to combine the separate Quicken datasets into one database.

The only (much less satisfactory) alternative would have been to edit the QIF files as if they had come from one Quicken dataset.

Re complex transactions the most recent conversion I performed threw up some interesting challenges: FIX left some unresolved broken transactions that I could not resolve without going back to the original to understand where they had come from.