# seek advice from quicken users who have both US and Canadian financial accounts



## newtoquebec (Oct 3, 2010)

Hi - I have various US and Canada based financial accounts (credit cards, bank accounts, brokerage & retirement accounts, etc) and if I have to count the number of accounts it is pretty much split 50-50. From my nickname you can probably guess that I used to live in the US and recently moved to Canada. I have been using Quicken US multicurrency version to track my spending and manage my accounts. For those who have experience with Quicken, the support for Canadian financial institution in Quicken US version is limited and vice versa, as often either the institution cannot be found or download through one-step update or manual QFX just don't work. While I was researching a solution I enter all my Canada-based transactions manually. As those activities increase while my US-based activities still remain unchanged, this becomes quite unmanageable. 

I was thinking about the following possible solutions:

1. Get both Quicken US and Canada version. Use Quicken Canada version for all Canadian-based activities. But then I will often have to look at two data files to get a whole picture.

2. do a little bit manual work in the Quicken US version. I'd love to elaborate the details but in nutshell I will have to process the Canadian banking data and make it importable for Quicken Us version. While this still takes quite a bit of manual work but is not as time-consuming as manual entry. 

For those who have both US and Canadian financial accounts and use a software, what is your solution?


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## brad (May 22, 2009)

newtoquebec said:


> For those who have both US and Canadian financial accounts and use a software, what is your solution?


I do it all manually, it's not really that time-consuming and it forces me to pay closer attention to my finances. I lived in the US most of my life and moved to Québec 8 years ago, so like you I have accounts in both countries; I've been usng Quicken since about 1994. For about five years in the US I had Quicken update my accounts automatically, but enough small errors crept in over time (plus I didn't like the fact that I was forced to upgrade to new versions of Quicken every few years in order to maintain the connection to my banks) that I decide to switch to entering everything manually.

The first few years here were a pain because I had a lot of activity in both my US and Canadian accounts. But gradually the activity shifted to my Canadian accounts; nowadays I have a total of maybe 15-20 transactions per year in my US account, mainly when I'm traveling there or have bills to pay in US dollars.

I'm pretty sure the Canadian version of Quicken for Windows allows you to set up US dollar accounts, but as you've noted you can't connect to them online. I used the Canadian Windows version of Quicken for a few years, but I do all my finances on a Mac and got tired of having to reboot (or use a virtual machine) into Windows, so I switched to Quicken Essentials for Mac, which is pretty basic but works fine for my purposes.


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