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Personal Finance type software?

garyd9 said:
Next stop: liquid ledger...
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This one suffered from the import... I imported my QIF file exported from MS Money, and the program seemed to think I had about a hundred accounts. This was pretty interesting considering I only exported a single checking account from MS Money. Turns out that the program interpreted each MS Money category as a separate account! This will not do... not at all...

So far, of the non-Quicken alternatives, iBank has come the closest, but there are a few problems:

Obviously, the bugs... deleting graphs causing lockups, categories disappearing, etc. It would also be REALLY nice if when importing OFX (direct download), iBank used its memorized transactions to pre-fill things such as categories and splits. (The splits is a big deal, as I get the exact same direct deposit check every two weeks, and asking my wife to re-type the amounts for all the payroll deductions is asking too much.) I'd also like a way to delete the "portfolio" label from the left sidebar, as I have no desire to use the program to track investments.

So.... it looks like I might be in the same boat as several others in this thread: having virtualization software installed just so I can run ONE program: financial software.

I only wish that the developers of iBank would realize that (at least from what I've seen so far) they have the leading financial software - and that they could lock the bulk of the mac market if they'd concentrate on fixing issues and making the program more user friendly. (and cover flow is NOT a user friendly feature.. it's purely gold plating.)
 
just a quick note: ibank appears to have a new version, 3.2.2, that MAY fix some of the issues... Guess I won't give up all hope just yet...
 
iBank, revisited (after the new 3.2.2 version):

Okay, I can finally delete charts without the program locking up. All the other issues I had were still there. I did spend a bit more time with importing, and found it extremely annoying...

There doesn't seem to be any way to "match" a downloaded (or imported) transaction to one that's already in the register. You either import the transaction, or you don't. If you import something thats already in the register, you get a duplicate. If you don't import it, its gone forever (more on this later.)

It would make more sense if a potentially imported transaction could have four possible states: Not yet acted on, Import as new (creates a new transaction in the register), import as match (which basically does nothing except maybe update a memo, check number, etc), or Delete.

If a transaction is not yet acted on, it is held by the program and is displayed every single time the user imports or direct downloads. In other words, if I have the import screen up, and I'm halfway thru the list and want to update my register, I can hit an "OK" button, exit the program, play a game, and come back into iBank later to finish imported. As the program is now, anything I don't import as a new transaction is DELETED when I leave the import screen. (If it isn't deleted, then I couldn't easily find where those transactions went... and I couldn't find it, my wife surely wouldn't be able to.) It appears that the next time you do a direct download, those non-imported transactions will be gone.. forever. I can just feel the NSF charges coming as a result of THAT.

Due to this, I can say that my wife will NOT be using iBank anytime soon... it had quite a ways yet to go before I could consider it a mature program. The developers would do themselves good by playing around with other packages and learning better ways to handle things...

Next up? I'm going to play around with Quicken 2007 again. Even if quicken has completely abandoned Mac users, if the program works, then there's no reason not to use it. The alternative at this point only seems to be to keep MS Money in a VM...

I'll ask folks again, as I can't seem to get a good answer: what about Quicken 2007 is buggy or broken? I know it's still a PPC application, but that alone doesn't make it "broken."
 
What about iCash/My Money/iFinance?

I have been tracking our finances with Microsoft Money for the past six months or so on my PC. My husband just purchased a long coveted iMac for me and now I need to figure out something else.

To put a twist into my issue, I live in France. I have French and US bank accounts. Will anything besides Quicken allow me to import my French account? I can't seem to figure much out about the downloads for finance software on Mac's website.

I used Money for basic things - check register and credit cards. Don't really do any investment work on it (yet).

garyd- I'm in the same boat as you, wondering why so many complaints about Quicken. I'll be interested to hear what kinds of luck you have with quicken.

My Money seems like it would work well but I'm guessing that it won't import from my French account.

iBank looks so pretty and I like the option of it synching with an iPhone. Ugh. Why can't it just work?
 
Thought on iBank - if I don't enter anything manually, will it still be an issue when I download things? There really isn't any way to mess that up is there?

Of course, I'm still assuming it can work with international banks/foreign currencies.
 
Have you looked at Moneydance? I'm a long time Quicken user and found moneydance works for me. I especially like the income/expense reports.
 
I've been using Quicken (Windows) for over 5 years now, the last 3 of which, I've been using Quicken Home and Small Business.

When I first switched to Mac in February, 2008, I did extensive research and tested at least 10 different applications, all of which have been referred to here. I have yet to find an application that does everything that I need and will allow me to import all of my data.

I really wish Quicken would just provide a similar product for the Mac OS. The only reason I'm running Windows XP through Parallels is to use this product, and I simply cannot live without it.

I recently tried it with Crossover, but it was so sluggish that I gave up on that.

It's very frustrating cause it takes so much time to install each package and then import all the data, which has limitations in trial versions, and then test every function. argh!:mad:
 
My goal is to trial run quicken, moneydance, and iBank. The problem is I don't know if quicken will give me a free trial or not. I really want iBank to work. I'm hoping that if I keep things simple, it will. But, I guess we'll see.
 
I thought I'd throw in some general comments here. I'm developing my own personal finance package (not mature enough for me to publish its url yet) so I've been looking a lot at these programs.

These types of programs are very individual and "stylistic" as they are primarily a workflow based program. They contain, in single documents, many different types of data and have to provide many different views into that data. This is why so many of them are very different both visually and usably (is that a word? spellchecker thinks it is). I faced the same issue when I migrated from Windows to Linux, then again onto a Mac. Because of the differences in the programs the user has to be prepared to let go of the old program. You will never find something that is the same.

Then lets take it a bit further. You approach the new program with a bunch of requirements in your head, usually carried over from the last program, and when they aren't met, the new prog fails. What should be done is a good look at this list of requirements. Are they real? Can you live without them? Does the new program have something similar that may improve what you really need?

Also. A point on historic data. I had about 5 years of data in my MSMoney files. Why? What good does historic data do? They only real present use is for the program to calculate the current balance. Beyond that its useless. To yourself is holding onto all that data really useful? Can you keep the MSMoney files as archive and start afresh on a new program?

I'm writing an envelope budgeter to control what I spend before I spend it. Historic data and seeing what I've spent is no use if I've already spent the money. It's nice to have reports but thats what archive files and Virtualbox is for.

Also, not many programs will successfully import full Account+Transaction QIF files because the QIF standard is a shocking mess. Not even Quicken follows the standard properly. My advice, find a program thats good enough and start fresh.
 
Any of these softwares for MAC run in countries outside USA? Or there are setup for USA customers?
 
I just received an e-mail from Quicken about the Quicken Financial Life for Mac beta being released:

http://www.quicken.com/financial-life

Installed it, it is very very different from past Quicken versions on the Mac. Supposedly rewritten entirely from scratch in Cocoa for the Mac. It definitely looks Mac like, which is already a bonus. Don't have time to play with it right now, but will later.
 
chrisgeleven said:
I just received an e-mail from Quicken about the Quicken Financial Life for Mac beta being released:

http://www.quicken.com/financial-life

Installed it, it is very very different from past Quicken versions on the Mac. Supposedly rewritten entirely from scratch in Cocoa for the Mac. It definitely looks Mac like, which is already a bonus. Don't have time to play with it right now, but will later.
Click to expand...

I was really looking forward to this software, well, i am still looking forward to it. BUT i am very disappointed that they pushed back the release until SUMMER of 2009. I like most though that it would at least be released by the end of this year.
 
richpjr said:
I'm in the same both and that is the sole program I am using Parallels for.
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+1,

I am running a small (very small) biz with MS Money via Parallels. I tried Quicken for Mac 2007 for about 6 months and just hated it. I'm looking a for a Mac based alternative that doesn't cost $100's and so far nothing jumps out at me.
 
Good luck finding a better alternative to MS Money. Its the only thing I run in VMware Fusion. I've tried a bunch of alternatives and I keep going back to Money. Heck, I even have an older version, Money 2006, and its still better.

I only use it for the checkbook register and the bill reminders. One thing I especially like is that I can setup reoccurring transactions, and when its time to "pay" it, I click enter and I'm able to adjust / change the amount, change the date, put in a unique comment, etc, if it varies from month to month (credit card for example). I haven't found a single Mac app that does the same thing in a graceful way.
 
I'm also on the look out for an ms money alternative - so will keep an eye on this thread.

I don't want to put windows on my mac - for 2 reasons 1) I just don't want windows anywhere near my awesome machine and 2) the expense of buying parralells or fusion and a copy of xp - I'd much rather spend the money on a good mac program that will do the job even better than ms money - if only there was one out there????

So I'm currently using my old xp laptop when I need to for ms money, windows live messenger and ms publisher (pages is better I know but the person I have to send stuff to still has only windows :( )

I really want to turn my back on anything microsoft but until I get a money equivalent and a messenger that does audio and/or video to other msn/live users I'm struggling.
 
Sapphire08 said:
I don't want to put windows on my mac - for 2 reasons 1) I just don't want windows anywhere near my awesome machine and 2) the expense of buying parralells or fusion and a copy of xp - I'd much rather spend the money on a good mac program that will do the job even better than ms money - if only there was one out there????
Click to expand...

There's no need to purchase Fusion or Parallels. You can use VirtualBox, which is free, to run MS Money. MS Money is decidedly low key, so VirtualBox won't have any issue handling it. VirtualBox is sponsored by Sun Microsystems, and I've used it and found it to be quite capable. http://www.virtualbox.org/

You'd still need to get a copy of Windows however.
 
After trying several programs, I decided to show them to the wife and asked her to decide if she wanted to use one of them, or continue with Fusion and MS Money...

Her choice? She has both Quicken '07 (mac) and MS Money (via Fusion) running side by side... and it seems like she's going to go with Quicken... Recently, she's been having issues with Money where it, for no reason whatsoever, peaks to 100% of the virtual machine's CPU and freezes (and the process has to be terminated.) The only reason she's running both at once right now is to allow her to do everything twice - once in each program. This will hopefully get her used to the program, and let her find any issues she might have with it.

I still haven't seen any of the "horrible bugs" that people claims the Quicken code has. Yes, it's a PPC binary. Yes, Intuit seems to be treating Mac users as second class citizens. However, the program seems to work just fine - and is much easier to work with when you don't need virtual machines to get it going.
 
Thanks for the info on the Quicken Beta. I look forward to checking it out. I used Quickbooks Pro for both my home and business when I was a Windows guy, but after I moved to the Mac world I just created a (rather extensive) Excel workbook. I actually like it better than any program I've used, except I have to manually reconcile transactions which costs me a few hours a week.
 
Looks like the developer is now starting to put together the plans for iBank 4. Amongst some of the features that they are hoping to include is online banking (bill pay) as well as improvements to reports, reconciliation, and budgeting. Always keeping my eyes open but I still haven't found a software that I like better than MS Money. Currently I've got all of my data in Moneydance.
 
drichards said:
Your machine isn't as secure as that cloud, and your bank is insured to take care of you and make things right after any wrongful transaction, regardless of how it happened. Washington Mutual isn't very nice about it though... but I'll save my story for another day. It has nothing to do with a cloud.
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Ok, I'll give you that there is nothing inherently more secure about a program on my machine; a malicious coder could just as easily steal my information from within a local program that calls home as they could on a website. Otherwise though, why would using an online system be more secure?
 
Have you found the answer?

I have the same question. I am currently on a free trial for Accountedge MYOB. I am bookkeeper and I work with quickbooks at work but that seemed too much for home use. Have you decided what fits your needs, if so please let me know. I just saw a free version of Quickbooks quickstart or simple start something like that and it is indefinitely free but I don't want to load too much on my new computer. I'm trying to keep this one clean. Any advice?
Thanks!
 
garyd9 said:
I still haven't seen any of the "horrible bugs" that people claims the Quicken code has. Yes, it's a PPC binary. Yes, Intuit seems to be treating Mac users as second class citizens. However, the program seems to work just fine - and is much easier to work with when you don't need virtual machines to get it going.
Click to expand...

I've been using Quicken also. I have been using it for about a year and after getting used to the change from MS money I haven't had any problems with it.

I only do basic stuff with it, check book, bank accounts, and 401K, but it's kept me straight so far. I do wish they would put a little more emphasis on their Mac stuff.
 
quicken fusionproblems

i only use fusion so i can use my quicken. as of yesterday i can't print from quicken. i connected my hp printer in the Settings. check from My Computer that is is not offline, but i keep getting an error message and/or after i click print, nothing happens.
i can print on the mac side. any ideas?
 
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