Recommend financial software.

[gregmac19]

It works for me, it doesn't "talk" with anything on the Internet, and I've got 40 years experience with the beast. Might as well ask why would anyone drive a 1964 Jaguar type-E coupe?

I didn’t ask why you use it: I asked why someone who isn’t a current user (e.g., the O.P.) would choose to use it.

 

[Fallforward]

OK, one more OT. Sadly, I never owned a Type-E. I did, however, own a 1971 MG-B/GT. Yes: noisy, lousy electronics, no AC, hard to keep tuned, etc, but really fun to drive. End of OT. Just saying, OLD!=BAD.

My first car was a used 1967 manual Mercury Cougar pseudo-2-seater. Loved driving that car. Bought it when discharged from the military and GM gave vets returning from a war zone six months factory employment. Driving home on empty rural roads, 3am summer morning after the night shift, windows down, "American Pie" on the radio, a good memory.

 

[NoBoMac]

Moderator Note:

Let's try to get back on the road regarding the topic of the thread.

 

[gerdgoebel]

I have used Moneydance for years. Whilst living in the US I could download all my bank, investment and CC transactions directly into Moneydance.
Now that I live in Europe, I just export the bank and CC transactions and import it. They have a very nice and flexible CSV importer as part of the software.

 

[TheIntruder]

I've been using CheckBook Pro for several years. It's pretty solid, light weight and it's like $30. You can import data from your bank/CU/credit card and eliminate data entry.

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I only have simple needs -- an electronic check register -- so I bought CBP after making Sequoia my primary boot system. Support was responsive when I had a question, and no issues have cropped up. The migration process from Quicken 2007 was painless as well.

If I could have dragged Q2007 along, I probably would have. It still was still mostly functional up to Mojave at least.

 

[balticgreen]

Long, long ago, I used various versions of Quicken up to 2007 (for even a few years after the calendar year of 2007). When the whole Quicken-on-Mac situation showed no evidence of ever really moving forward, I switched to Moneydance. It was a good program and I used it through several upgrades (paying for whichever ones weren't free). Eventually I started having problems downloading transactions for accounts. Moneydance Support kept saying it wasn't their problem and blamed the banks.

I did a trial of SEE Finance at that point just to see and had no issues downloading transactions for those very same accounts. Literally had them running side by side, clicked download in Moneydance... fail. Clicked download in SEE Finance... success. Hmmm. So I dumped Moneydance and paid for SEE Finance. That worked well for maybe a year or two until more and more banks discontinued support for OFX Direct Connect. Manually downloading files is just a no-go for me, so I looked around yet again for options.

I landed on Banktivity because it supports Yodlee and Plaid. Yes, it's a subscription, and yes that's annoying, but honestly with all the jumping around between programs that I've had to do because the pay-once options didn't update fast enough to respond to changes made by banks and my transaction downloading kept breaking, I'm willing to pay the subscription for a program that reliably does what I need it to do. I've been using it for I think 3 years now.

I am aware that Moneydance now has a subscription Plus or Premium or whatever that adds Plaid support and that probably would meet my needs now (this wasn't an option when I left them years ago), but it's also a subscription and I'm happy enough with Banktivity that I don't feel a need to change yet again.

If you don't care about downloading transactions, any of these three are good options (Banktivity, Moneydance, or SEE Finance). If you do care about that, then Banktivity or Moneydance with the subscription would be the two I'd look into.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

I landed on Banktivity because it supports Yodlee and Plaid. Yes, it's a subscription, and yes that's annoying, but honestly with all the jumping around between programs that I've had to do because the pay-once options didn't update fast enough to respond to changes made by banks and my transaction downloading kept breaking, I'm willing to pay the subscription for a program that reliably does what I need it to do. I've been using it for I think 3 years now.

I tried Banktivity a couple of years ago... What I didn't like about it, is the way it handles downloaded transactions. It'd mark all downloaded as "New" transactions, for 24 hours - period. Unlike Quicken where as you "Review" each transaction with Alt-R, it removes the mark. Makes it WAY easier for me to keep track of what I've seen and what I haven't, on the 15-or so accounts I sync every day.

I even contacted Banktivity support and was told - yeah, that's just how it works ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Did they ever change that? Seemed okay, until I got to that quirk.

 

[balticgreen]

I tried Banktivity a couple of years ago... What I didn't like about it, is the way it handles downloaded transactions. It'd mark all downloaded as "New" transactions, for 24 hours - period. Unlike Quicken where as you "Review" each transaction with Alt-R, it removes the mark. Makes it WAY easier for me to keep track of what I've seen and what I haven't, on the 15-or so accounts I sync every day.

I even contacted Banktivity support and was told - yeah, that's just how it works ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Did they ever change that? Seemed okay, until I got to that quirk.

They have not changed that. I turned off the automatic downloads so that transactions only download when I click the update button. I have a few accounts that require 2FA with short timeouts so that can quickly become annoying. Thus I only update once a day, twice at the most. It is a quirk but not a big deal to me.

 

[mk313]

Long, long ago, I used various versions of Quicken up to 2007 (for even a few years after the calendar year of 2007). When the whole Quicken-on-Mac situation showed no evidence of ever really moving forward, I switched to Moneydance. It was a good program and I used it through several upgrades (paying for whichever ones weren't free). Eventually I started having problems downloading transactions for accounts. Moneydance Support kept saying it wasn't their problem and blamed the banks.

I did a trial of SEE Finance at that point just to see and had no issues downloading transactions for those very same accounts. Literally had them running side by side, clicked download in Moneydance... fail. Clicked download in SEE Finance... success. Hmmm. So I dumped Moneydance and paid for SEE Finance. That worked well for maybe a year or two until more and more banks discontinued support for OFX Direct Connect. Manually downloading files is just a no-go for me, so I looked around yet again for options.

I landed on Banktivity because it supports Yodlee and Plaid. Yes, it's a subscription, and yes that's annoying, but honestly with all the jumping around between programs that I've had to do because the pay-once options didn't update fast enough to respond to changes made by banks and my transaction downloading kept breaking, I'm willing to pay the subscription for a program that reliably does what I need it to do. I've been using it for I think 3 years now.

I am aware that Moneydance now has a subscription Plus or Premium or whatever that adds Plaid support and that probably would meet my needs now (this wasn't an option when I left them years ago), but it's also a subscription and I'm happy enough with Banktivity that I don't feel a need to change yet again.

If you don't care about downloading transactions, any of these three are good options (Banktivity, Moneydance, or SEE Finance). If you do care about that, then Banktivity or Moneydance with the subscription would be the two I'd look into.

I'm not saying this is the case & I could be wrong, but isn't plaid the back end financial integrator that allows you to connect banks, etc, but don't they also make their money by aggregating & selling your anonymized data to advertisers

 

[balticgreen]

I'm not saying this is the case & I could be wrong, but isn't plaid the back end financial integrator that allows you to connect banks, etc, but don't they also make their money by aggregating & selling your anonymized data to advertisers

Yes, but ten thousand other companies are already selling my aggregated, anonymized data, for which I receive absolutely nothing, so I might as well receive some convenience out of downloading my transactions.

Edit: Plaid may not be selling data, but Yodlee apparently is.

 

[gregmac19]

I'm not saying this is the case & I could be wrong, but isn't plaid the back end financial integrator that allows you to connect banks, etc, but don't they also make their money by aggregating & selling your anonymized data to advertisers

From the webpage “https://tinygrab.com/does-plaid-sell-your-data/“ I found the following statements:

“... Plaid’s business model revolves around providing a secure and efficient data pipeline, monetizing through fees charged to the apps and services that use their platform.”

“Plaid may share aggregated and anonymized data with partners for research, analytics, and other purposes. However, this data is stripped of personally identifiable information, making it difficult to trace back to an individual.”

 

[mk313]

From the webpage “https://tinygrab.com/does-plaid-sell-your-data/“ I found the following statements:

“... Plaid’s business model revolves around providing a secure and efficient data pipeline, monetizing through fees charged to the apps and services that use their platform.”

“Plaid may share aggregated and anonymized data with partners for research, analytics, and other purposes. However, this data is stripped of personally identifiable information, making it difficult to trace back to an individual.”

Thanks! And I'm not totally against it, just want to make sure people understand the tradeoffs in using the service.

 

[zeus423]

A company I no longer enjoy doing business with.

Yes, Moneydance. In the App store. Been using it for quite a while now. I was able to ingest my old Quicken data back to 2011 or so. And, do daily downloads of new transactions in the morning, which some banks still let you do. That is, directly download transactions, although the banking industry keeps saying that they are going to stop doing it that way, and require users to download through a third-party, for security reasons. But, yes, with Moneydance is definitely recommended.

I've also used Moneydance for several years now after migrating from Quicken. It does what I need it to do and works well.

 

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