UK MoneyWiz or MoneyDance?

[benoitx]

Hello

I've read quite a few threads about a potential replacement to my old Quicken 2004 on Windows. As it is the only reason why I am running Parallels, I'm looking for an alternative for Mac with Cloud Sync / iDevices.

I would like to be able to import the QIF files without too much pain.

I do not have to deal with VAT but anything that would support the UK banks etc would be great. I have some US shares to keep track as well as the usual bank accounts/petty cash.

I have seen positive comments about MoneyWiz and MoneyDance.

I would like to hear from UK users experience for either product.

Many thanks in advance,

Benoit

 

[iyordanov]

Hello

I've read quite a few threads about a potential replacement to my old Quicken 2004 on Windows. As it is the only reason why I am running Parallels, I'm looking for an alternative for Mac with Cloud Sync / iDevices.

I would like to be able to import the QIF files without too much pain.

I do not have to deal with VAT but anything that would support the UK banks etc would be great. I have some US shares to keep track as well as the usual bank accounts/petty cash.

I have seen positive comments about MoneyWiz and MoneyDance.

I would like to hear from UK users experience for either product.

Many thanks in advance,

Benoit

Hi,

This is Iliya from the MoneyWiz team, so obviously my comment would be biased
I just wanted to say that around 30% of our customers are in the UK. Since I, as a founder of the company, have spent quite a while in the UK it was a personal mission to make MoneyWiz work properly for the UK. It also supports all major banks for bank sync.

Anyways, I just wanted to say that if you have specific questions about MoneyWiz I'd be happy to answer them!

PS Also you can always try MoneyWiz for free if you buy it from our website (http://www.moneywizapp.com) as we have 90 days no questions asked refunds policy.

 

[NazgulRR]

I ran both for about 2 months and ultimately went with MoneyDance. It is far more customisable and powerful than MoneyWiz. I'd suggest at this point MoneyDance for power users with multiple accounts incl. investment accounts and MoneyWiz for simple users with few accounts to keep track of it and simple, straightforward incomes/expenses.

Things that were really important for me that were missing from MW but are present in MD:
- investment account support including UK founds (though for the most I need to manually update the price - I use the security price loader extensions with market data export from FT.com) and stocks
- expenses or incomes can both be either positive or negative
- multiple QIF import
- QIF export (VERY important if you ever decide to switch to different software)
- batch editing of transactions and changing them into transfers
- any transaction can be split into part transfer part income/expense.

I should mention I preferred the QIF import on MD. MW qif import on Mac was very inconsistent across various of banks I have and for some of them it truncated the full description, which resulted in loss of information in the description for the transaction inside the app. MW support team on Facebook was very attentive in trying to help, however, they weren't able to help solve the problem as what I saw as a problem was meant as a design by them. I did find a work around in the end, but found the process way too laborious to be doing it.

I liked MW's pretty graphs and the pretty iOS app tho. MD's iOS app is a very basic expense tracker only - tho for the most of the time that is all you will need anyway. The CSV export in MW seems to work nicer than the one in MD too and I found the budget manager to be way simpler than the one in MD.

I like seeing Iliya join on here. Wouldn't mind hearing his opinion on the above points. I know they have recently published their future strategy and decided to make MW a much more elaborate finance tracker, which I applaud very much.

I suggest you try both, especially QIF import for all your accounts and how it imports all the information and assigns categories/payees. I have for now decided on MD, but will keep one eye open on MW's development for sure.

 

[benoitx]

Hi,

This is Iliya from the MoneyWiz team, so obviously my comment would be biased
I just wanted to say that around 30% of our customers are in the UK. Since I, as a founder of the company, have spent quite a while in the UK it was a personal mission to make MoneyWiz work properly for the UK. It also supports all major banks for bank sync.

Anyways, I just wanted to say that if you have specific questions about MoneyWiz I'd be happy to answer them!

PS Also you can always try MoneyWiz for free if you buy it from our website (http://www.moneywizapp.com) as we have 90 days no questions asked refunds policy.

Thank you for your reply. I appreciate the 90d trial period.

Quick question: Does MoneyWiz support tracking a Portfolio of US shares? Quite basic stuff but need to record buy/sales and Dividends. Thanks.
[doublepost=1460588558][/doublepost]

I ran both for about 2 months and ultimately went with MoneyDance. It is far more customisable and powerful than MoneyWiz. I'd suggest at this point MoneyDance for power users with multiple accounts incl. investment accounts and MoneyWiz for simple users with few accounts to keep track of it and simple, straightforward incomes/expenses.

Things that were really important for me that were missing from MW but are present in MD:
- investment account support including UK founds (though for the most I need to manually update the price - I use the security price loader extensions with market data export from FT.com) and stocks
- expenses or incomes can both be either positive or negative
- multiple QIF import
- QIF export (VERY important if you ever decide to switch to different software)
- batch editing of transactions and changing them into transfers
- any transaction can be split into part transfer part income/expense.

I should mention I preferred the QIF import on MD. MW qif import on Mac was very inconsistent across various of banks I have and for some of them it truncated the full description, which resulted in loss of information in the description for the transaction inside the app. MW support team on Facebook was very attentive in trying to help, however, they weren't able to help solve the problem as what I saw as a problem was meant as a design by them. I did find a work around in the end, but found the process way too laborious to be doing it.

I liked MW's pretty graphs and the pretty iOS app tho. MD's iOS app is a very basic expense tracker only - tho for the most of the time that is all you will need anyway. The CSV export in MW seems to work nicer than the one in MD too and I found the budget manager to be way simpler than the one in MD.

I like seeing Iliya join on here. Wouldn't mind hearing his opinion on the above points. I know they have recently published their future strategy and decided to make MW a much more elaborate finance tracker, which I applaud very much.

I suggest you try both, especially QIF import for all your accounts and how it imports all the information and assigns categories/payees. I have for now decided on MD, but will keep one eye open on MW's development for sure.

Thank you for your very comprehensive reply.
Very appreciated.

Benoit

 

[iyordanov]

Thank you for your reply. I appreciate the 90d trial period.

Quick question: Does MoneyWiz support tracking a Portfolio of US shares? Quite basic stuff but need to record buy/sales and Dividends. Thanks.
[doublepost=1460588558][/doublepost]
Benoit

Hi Benoit,

Not yet unfortunately. This is on our roadmap for MoneyWiz 2.5 which we'll release this summer. More about the roadmap:
http://moneywizapp.com/features/#roadmap
[doublepost=1460591033][/doublepost]

I ran both for about 2 months and ultimately went with MoneyDance. It is far more customisable and powerful than MoneyWiz. I'd suggest at this point MoneyDance for power users with multiple accounts incl. investment accounts and MoneyWiz for simple users with few accounts to keep track of it and simple, straightforward incomes/expenses.

Things that were really important for me that were missing from MW but are present in MD:
- investment account support including UK founds (though for the most I need to manually update the price - I use the security price loader extensions with market data export from FT.com) and stocks
- expenses or incomes can both be either positive or negative
- multiple QIF import
- QIF export (VERY important if you ever decide to switch to different software)
- batch editing of transactions and changing them into transfers
- any transaction can be split into part transfer part income/expense.

I should mention I preferred the QIF import on MD. MW qif import on Mac was very inconsistent across various of banks I have and for some of them it truncated the full description, which resulted in loss of information in the description for the transaction inside the app. MW support team on Facebook was very attentive in trying to help, however, they weren't able to help solve the problem as what I saw as a problem was meant as a design by them. I did find a work around in the end, but found the process way too laborious to be doing it.

I liked MW's pretty graphs and the pretty iOS app tho. MD's iOS app is a very basic expense tracker only - tho for the most of the time that is all you will need anyway. The CSV export in MW seems to work nicer than the one in MD too and I found the budget manager to be way simpler than the one in MD.

I like seeing Iliya join on here. Wouldn't mind hearing his opinion on the above points. I know they have recently published their future strategy and decided to make MW a much more elaborate finance tracker, which I applaud very much.

I suggest you try both, especially QIF import for all your accounts and how it imports all the information and assigns categories/payees. I have for now decided on MD, but will keep one eye open on MW's development for sure.

Hi there,

Thanks for the feedback, let me provide some answers myself...

- Investment accounts is something we're working on and I hope to release this summer. It's on our roadmap for MoneyWiz 2.5 together with tags & receipts sync: http://moneywizapp.com/features/#roadmap
- Expense or incomes with positive or negative sign - we actually have native Refund functionality to handle refunds. The only other case where this is needed is reimbursements where you just need to offset a category. We've had plenty of discussions internally about this and decided to do it after all, so expect this to be done but definitely after the 2.5 update.
- Multiple QIF import - not sure what you mean but if you mean multiple files all at once, indeed MoneyWiz doesn't do that. You can import them one by one though.
- QIF export - it's on our to-do list as well.
- Batch editing - we have that on Mac and Windows only, but it doesn't allow you to switch the type of the transaction. You can batch edit other properties such as amount, date, category, payee etc, but not the transaction type.
- Split a signle transaction into part transfer part income/expense - this is on our todo list as well.

Some of these features I expect to see in MoneyWiz 3 in Q1/2017, others sooner than that. I can tell you this much - we love what we do and we really strive to make MoneyWiz better and better with every new update. The only reason some features are missing is that we've put our priorities on other features which we consider a differentiator between us and competitors. Features like seamless cross-platform sync, fully featured app on all platforms (iOS, Mac, Windows, Android), insanely good online banking that supports banks in over 50 countries etc. Of course if it was up to me, I'd have all the features in the world done by now, but the reality of things is that each thing takes time, especially when you need to do it for each platform separately. I hope you understand

 

[benoitx]

Hi Benoit,

Not yet unfortunately. This is on our roadmap for MoneyWiz 2.5 which we'll release this summer. More about the roadmap:
http://moneywizapp.com/features/#roadmap
[doublepost=1460591033][/doublepost]

Thanks for the update. I have looked at the site and decided to download it directly from you guys.

I will have a serious go at it but could you give me a quick answer to this: How could I have 2 sets of accounts? I intend to use MW for my personal account and for my small business but these 2 need to be separate. With Quicken it was just the matter of opening 1 QDF file or the other... How could I do this with MW?

Many thanks.

 

[iyordanov]

Hi,

You can manage multiple sets of accounts (such as business and personal) via SYNCbits (the cloud sync platform). Basically you can register multiple SYNCbits accounts for free and just switch between them.

For MoneyWiz 3 we plan to make that much quicker in terms of access though because we're getting more and more customers who want to manage separate set of personal and business accounts.

 

[NazgulRR]

Some of these features I expect to see in MoneyWiz 3 in Q1/2017, others sooner than that. I can tell you this much - we love what we do and we really strive to make MoneyWiz better and better with every new update. The only reason some features are missing is that we've put our priorities on other features which we consider a differentiator between us and competitors. Features like seamless cross-platform sync, fully featured app on all platforms (iOS, Mac, Windows, Android), insanely good online banking that supports banks in over 50 countries etc. Of course if it was up to me, I'd have all the features in the world done by now, but the reality of things is that each thing takes time, especially when you need to do it for each platform separately. I hope you understand

REALLY appreciate the answer, thank you! I will definitely keep an eye on MW through my GF who is using it.