This can happen if your file was created on MoneyWorks 6 or earlier and for some (unknown) reason, the automatic transcoding of the text in the file was not completed when it was upgraded to v7.
Another sign of this problem will be error messages in the log file of the form [ERROR] text not utf8:
Solution
This problem can be resolved by rerunning the text encoding conversion. To do this:
- Open the file in single user mode (if it is in a Datacentre server, make sure everyone is logged out and the file has been closed, then open the file directly in MoneyWorks Gold using Open Other…).
- If on MoneyWorks Gold, make sure that the file does not have Gold sharing turned on (looking in File ➝ Sharing and Users: if the Share “…” on the network checkbox is on, turn it off, close the file and open it again (this will make the conversion proceed much much faster).
- Go to File ➝ Diagnostics.
- Click the gearwheel button and choose Convert to UTF8. The entire database will be checked for text that is not in the correct encoding. Any such text will be assumed to be in the native encoding of the platform you are running on (MacRoman or WinLatin). It will be transcoded from that encoding to Unicode UTF-8.
- If your period names contain accented characters, go to Show -> Period Names, retype any period names with accented characters and click OK (actually making any change should be sufficient to store the names in unicode).