I'm a Moneydance user, and I've also spent quite a bit of time with iBank and MyMoney (www.mthbuilt.com). Both iBank and MyMoney have excellent customer service, so they are to be praised for that.
Ultimately, I just despise the iBank UI, which is purely a personal preference, but I couldn't live with it. Further, it seemed to bog down on a big data file.
MyMoney is a pretty young product but is extremely promising. It works on Mac, Windows, and Linux, which is nice. My major problems with MyMoney were (1) they don't support investment accounts yet (but it is coming), (2) account reconciliation is far too inflexible for my taste (you'll understand if you try it), and (3) I had trouble getting the online banking to work. But that product has a really rapid pace of development, so it is probably worth paying attention to.
So Moneydance is the big winner for me. Here are what I consider to be the highlights:
(1) truly cross-platform: runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux identically, and the same data file format works on all platforms
(2) the license lets a single user install Moneydance on all his/her computers. I have it running on two laptops (Mac and Ubuntu)
(3) helpful customer service in the official forum
(4) the company never sunsets older versions
(5) the company lets you upgrade to new versions for free for a year or two, and then at a discount thereafter
(6) the online banking is incredibly robust -- if your bank works in Quicken, it likely works in Moneydance too
(7) rock solid stability -- I've never had it crash
I will admit that budgeting and reporting are not quite up to Quicken's standards. But the basics are all there, including investment accounts, loan amortization, scheduled transactions, online bill pay etc. And there is a major update coming later this year that should put the advanced features closer to par with Quicken.
I participated in the beta of Financial Life for Mac and will tell you it was the most worthless software I had ever seen. And I am not alone. In reading the beta tester's forum I could not find one tester who had a single good thing to say about it.
Just as an example they completely got rid of Categories and replaced them with "Tags". This is how Tags were explained from the user guide,
Tags
If you’ve used Quicken or other personal finance applications before you may be familiar with
categories and classes, two ways to help track where your money is going. Financial Life uses a
new way of identifying where your money is going: tags. If you’ve used websites such as Flickr®
you’ll be at home with tags in Financial Life,
Using tags
We suggest you start by adding tags to the Tag List for each member of your family, a tag for
your house, and a tag for each vehicle. As you spend money, you can tag what you spent the
money on and who spent the money.
For example, Jane spent $45 on gas filling up the Volvo. You can tell the same story using tags:
Jane, Gas, Volvo, and enter the amount paid: $45. As you get used to tagging transactions this
way, you’ll be able to easily answer questions such as which car is costing more in repairs.
To me it has absolutely no structure.
As best I could tell in you needed to keep items purchased from one location separated you would need to enter them as new transactions.
Example, you go to Wal-Mart and buy some clothing goods, a CD and a gallon of milk. There is no way to itemize the transaction so your milk gets Tagged as a clothing item and entertainment because you have no option for splitting a transaction.
No way to denote Wages from Taxes as a single entry item, etc.
Someone commented that someone from Intuit had a prior association with Apple. I can only wonder if it was someone from Power Computing the cloning company from the 80's, that low era for the Mac.
Maybe I just wasn't able to figure it out but for me, yes the beta is truly that bad.
Moneydance is probably the best Quicken alternative on the Mac. As far as I know, it is the only personal finance software on the Mac (besides Quicken) that supports both investment tracking and online bill pay through direct connect with your bank. Also, they don't ever sunset their software, so you can use it for as long as you have a computer that runs it. Nice.
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
I am one of those folks who used Quicken as my primary banking system until they pulled the rug, and then my bank pulled the plug on supporting them. Not having many alternatives at the time, I reluctantly moved over to M$ Money. Three weeks ago M$ announced that Money was effectively going away and I was doubly pissed!
After seeing your comments on Moneydance, I gave it a whirl over the weekend. What a pleasant surprise! I was amazed that my history was able to be ported as an OFC file and all my custom tags, etc. came with it. Syncing was a breeze and no more endless waits for the updates to come through (I never did understand why that was always the case with both Quicken and Money).
I have sent off a few payments (the check kind), so I am still waiting to see how that functionality works. But hey, color me VERY happy at the moment.
I am one of those folks who used Quicken as my primary banking system until they pulled the rug, and then my bank pulled the plug on supporting them. Not having many alternatives at the time, I reluctantly moved over to M$ Money. Three weeks ago M$ announced that Money was effectively going away and I was doubly pissed!
After seeing your comments on Moneydance, I gave it a whirl over the weekend. What a pleasant surprise! I was amazed that my history was able to be ported as an OFC file and all my custom tags, etc. came with it. Syncing was a breeze and no more endless waits for the updates to come through (I never did understand why that was always the case with both Quicken and Money).
I have sent off a few payments (the check kind), so I am still waiting to see how that functionality works. But hey, color me VERY happy at the moment.
After all the raves about Moneydance, I decided to give it a try.
It made the worlds biggest mess of my Quicken file that I was importing. It was so bad that I didn't know where to begin to fix it and simply limped back to Quicken.
My Quicken file contains data going back to 1991. Perhaps there has been too many changes/conversions of my file over the years for Moneydance to properly convert.
After reading through this I decided to try MoneyDance. Whoa! What a bust! Not one account of any type came through with the right transactions or balances. Could not find anywhere to tell me how to setup direct-connect with my banks. The interface looks like a high school programming project that received a D- grade.
After reading through this I decided to try MoneyDance. Whoa! What a bust! Not one account of any type came through with the right transactions or balances. Could not find anywhere to tell me how to setup direct-connect with my banks. The interface looks like a high school programming project that received a D- grade.
Going to look at iBank and some others now.
You might want to test this Cocoa application out.
They also renamed it to "Quicken for Mac", which I'm thankful for. Now we just wait and see if they are still releasing it Feb 2010 (their site still says that's the plan).
They also renamed it to "Quicken for Mac", which I'm thankful for. Now we just wait and see if they are still releasing it Feb 2010 (their site still says that's the plan).
Perhaps they shouldn't be using jQuery or other javascript libraries for popup floats if they are just going to compress the images?
This image is not scaled properly in their web site code:
I've been on the beta for roughly a year... it's still a bit of a mess, and has so many features missing. I'll have to stick to Quicken Windows for a while yet.
Comments
Ultimately, I just despise the iBank UI, which is purely a personal preference, but I couldn't live with it. Further, it seemed to bog down on a big data file.
MyMoney is a pretty young product but is extremely promising. It works on Mac, Windows, and Linux, which is nice. My major problems with MyMoney were (1) they don't support investment accounts yet (but it is coming), (2) account reconciliation is far too inflexible for my taste (you'll understand if you try it), and (3) I had trouble getting the online banking to work. But that product has a really rapid pace of development, so it is probably worth paying attention to.
So Moneydance is the big winner for me. Here are what I consider to be the highlights:
(1) truly cross-platform: runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux identically, and the same data file format works on all platforms
(2) the license lets a single user install Moneydance on all his/her computers. I have it running on two laptops (Mac and Ubuntu)
(3) helpful customer service in the official forum
(4) the company never sunsets older versions
(5) the company lets you upgrade to new versions for free for a year or two, and then at a discount thereafter
(6) the online banking is incredibly robust -- if your bank works in Quicken, it likely works in Moneydance too
(7) rock solid stability -- I've never had it crash
I will admit that budgeting and reporting are not quite up to Quicken's standards. But the basics are all there, including investment accounts, loan amortization, scheduled transactions, online bill pay etc. And there is a major update coming later this year that should put the advanced features closer to par with Quicken.
Just as an example they completely got rid of Categories and replaced them with "Tags". This is how Tags were explained from the user guide,
Tags
If you’ve used Quicken or other personal finance applications before you may be familiar with
categories and classes, two ways to help track where your money is going. Financial Life uses a
new way of identifying where your money is going: tags. If you’ve used websites such as Flickr®
you’ll be at home with tags in Financial Life,
Using tags
We suggest you start by adding tags to the Tag List for each member of your family, a tag for
your house, and a tag for each vehicle. As you spend money, you can tag what you spent the
money on and who spent the money.
For example, Jane spent $45 on gas filling up the Volvo. You can tell the same story using tags:
Jane, Gas, Volvo, and enter the amount paid: $45. As you get used to tagging transactions this
way, you’ll be able to easily answer questions such as which car is costing more in repairs.
To me it has absolutely no structure.
As best I could tell in you needed to keep items purchased from one location separated you would need to enter them as new transactions.
Example, you go to Wal-Mart and buy some clothing goods, a CD and a gallon of milk. There is no way to itemize the transaction so your milk gets Tagged as a clothing item and entertainment because you have no option for splitting a transaction.
No way to denote Wages from Taxes as a single entry item, etc.
Someone commented that someone from Intuit had a prior association with Apple. I can only wonder if it was someone from Power Computing the cloning company from the 80's, that low era for the Mac.
Maybe I just wasn't able to figure it out but for me, yes the beta is truly that bad.
Moneydance is probably the best Quicken alternative on the Mac. As far as I know, it is the only personal finance software on the Mac (besides Quicken) that supports both investment tracking and online bill pay through direct connect with your bank. Also, they don't ever sunset their software, so you can use it for as long as you have a computer that runs it. Nice.
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
I am one of those folks who used Quicken as my primary banking system until they pulled the rug, and then my bank pulled the plug on supporting them. Not having many alternatives at the time, I reluctantly moved over to M$ Money. Three weeks ago M$ announced that Money was effectively going away and I was doubly pissed!
After seeing your comments on Moneydance, I gave it a whirl over the weekend. What a pleasant surprise! I was amazed that my history was able to be ported as an OFC file and all my custom tags, etc. came with it. Syncing was a breeze and no more endless waits for the updates to come through (I never did understand why that was always the case with both Quicken and Money).
I have sent off a few payments (the check kind), so I am still waiting to see how that functionality works. But hey, color me VERY happy at the moment.
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
I am one of those folks who used Quicken as my primary banking system until they pulled the rug, and then my bank pulled the plug on supporting them. Not having many alternatives at the time, I reluctantly moved over to M$ Money. Three weeks ago M$ announced that Money was effectively going away and I was doubly pissed!
After seeing your comments on Moneydance, I gave it a whirl over the weekend. What a pleasant surprise! I was amazed that my history was able to be ported as an OFC file and all my custom tags, etc. came with it. Syncing was a breeze and no more endless waits for the updates to come through (I never did understand why that was always the case with both Quicken and Money).
I have sent off a few payments (the check kind), so I am still waiting to see how that functionality works. But hey, color me VERY happy at the moment.
After all the raves about Moneydance, I decided to give it a try.
It made the worlds biggest mess of my Quicken file that I was importing. It was so bad that I didn't know where to begin to fix it and simply limped back to Quicken.
My Quicken file contains data going back to 1991. Perhaps there has been too many changes/conversions of my file over the years for Moneydance to properly convert.
Going to look at iBank and some others now.
After reading through this I decided to try MoneyDance. Whoa! What a bust! Not one account of any type came through with the right transactions or balances. Could not find anywhere to tell me how to setup direct-connect with my banks. The interface looks like a high school programming project that received a D- grade.
Going to look at iBank and some others now.
You might want to test this Cocoa application out.
http://scimonocesoftware.com/seefinance/index.html
http://quicken.intuit.com/personal-f...l-software.jsp
They also renamed it to "Quicken for Mac", which I'm thankful for. Now we just wait and see if they are still releasing it Feb 2010 (their site still says that's the plan).
Can I export my data to TurboTax?
Quicken for Mac does not support that capability. If you'd like that functionality, we recommend trying Quicken Mac 2007.
Looks like they made good on their promise to start accepting pre-orders on Oct 12:
http://quicken.intuit.com/personal-f...l-software.jsp
They also renamed it to "Quicken for Mac", which I'm thankful for. Now we just wait and see if they are still releasing it Feb 2010 (their site still says that's the plan).
Perhaps they shouldn't be using jQuery or other javascript libraries for popup floats if they are just going to compress the images?
This image is not scaled properly in their web site code:
The image is grabbed from this page:
http://quicken.intuit.com/personal-f...l-software.jsp
All See It magnifiers have poorly scaled images.
What caught my eye was the Tag Cloud reference and whether Quicken will try to put every account into the Cloud.