Being able to click on the calendar and then see upcoming balances is a must for me. I’m saddened to see that MoneyDance hasn’t implemented this already. They have the calendar now if they could add balances to it then it would be perfect.

The forecaster extension with that horrible graph format just doesn’t work.. It’s incredibly hard to read when compared to the nice clean calendar in Quicken that shows you day by day your balance.

No one has yet found another alternative with forecasting?

When I started with Moneydance I was switching from MS Money and I had no problems with the transfer. I’ve never had any experience of Quicken. (It’s not supported here in Britain.)

I played with Prospects for a few months. It was pretty but lacked features. Unfortunately the developer seems to have given up on it. I can only assume that developing a finance app isn’t all that rewarding.

There were comments here how smoothly this transfer went for other folks but all my accounts were screwed up and required going through all the accounts and fixing things. I mean, not one or two entries going wrong as everyone is suggesting but, at least, 50% of my data is wrong. It was especially bad for investment accounts which were all completely and thoroughly screwed up. I went through one of them spending several hours to fix it all up running Quicken in parallel and then MD crashed. And took all my work down the drain with it. And that fact scared me the most. Whatever you can say about Quicken, it never corrupted or destroyed my data no matter how hard it would crash. I may lose the last few transactions but not everything. So here I am, completely lost at the lack of real options, because if I can’t trust that my data survives, then why would I even use a financial package? I absolutely don’t care about UI, this is finances we are talking about and UI is just an icing on the cake and I can totally live without it but integrity and safety of data is a fundamental thing.

So what was your real life experience so far with the data in MD (or iBank fro that matter)? Did MD crash on you? Did you lose only what you were working at that moment or did it damage your whole file? How well could MD recover from the crash? Could it just rebuild the data file like Quicken can?

And what is the deal with the transfer? Why are the accounts so badly screwed up contrary to what is asserted both by the developer and other folks? I can’t imagine that I have the most complicated transactions, although my trading accounts really brought MD down to its knees.

If I could be sure of Quicken 2006 being able to run on future Mac OS versions I would just sit tight and not bother with anything. But it is already quirky enough on Leopard and I am afraid to move to Snow Leopard to only find out that Quicken runs on it even worse or not at all.

There got to be a future for financial software on the Mac but so far the reality is not all that encouraging.

I *think* judging on what I’m reading that you’re UK based. From your research, do any of these apps work automatically with UK banks?

I haven’t found any that do yet.

Cheers

My verdict: Moneydance.

Thanks very much for keeping up with the comments on your three blog entries with regard to mac personal finance products. I’ve just spent the Independence Day Weekend searching for something to move away from Quicken on VMware/XP. I’ve been though just about all of them. I spent the most time with iBank 3.5, and now am finalizing on Moneydance.

I needed software that could track, checking, loans (properly amortized by the system), assets, like Japanese Yen (denominated in Yen), and generate reports I could trust. Before I get to iBank and Moneydance, let me run through a few others:

Moneywell: Looks okay, but can handle the loans. Moved on quickly.

Cha-Ching 2 Beta: Sorry, nice eye candy, but is a near featureless clone of iBank.

Fortora: Could not handle the loans. Short on features.

If all you need is basic checking and perhaps budgeting help, any of the above will work fine.

I initially looked at Moneydance based on your experience and the other comments. But, I really wanted an application designed natively for the Mac. Since iBank is now at 3.5, I thought I would try it out. I went ahead and bought it since I wanted to work with my data and the only way to get past the 100 entry limit on accounts was to pay for it. (There is a 30-day guarantee, which I will be using.)

iBank has pretty much everything I wanted. Handles the loans, the foreign currency, and has preferences to allow you to customize the interface to a certain extent. Basic layout is pretty good. Menus are clear and easy to navigate.

The biggest problem is that it is still too buggy. I got my car loan setup and working nicely. But when I created my mortgage loan, I did everything correctly, and it posted properly against my checking, but iBank did not track the loan balance properly. I deleted it, and created it again, and got it working, but I had to reenter a bunch of transactions.

Then, suddenly, the import utility stopped working. Everytime I tried to use it, I just got the import window all grayed and could not get past it. (Quit, restarted, rebooted, and eventually had to delete the software [kept my ibank file] and reinstall it and got import working again.)

The reports are generated in realtime based on options (of which there are VERY few), and since graphic based in the UI, are very slow. They are also not working correctly. It saw my credit card as an “assett” for example and gave me no way to change it. There were more issues, but ultimately, the reports end up being useless since you cannot rely on the information to be accurate.

I gave it a good shot, and came close, but the bugs introduced errors in reporting, and to me, that tends to make this type of software useless. I spent 18 hours trying to get it to work.

While a lot of the planning I did to structure my financial information was conducted in iBank, the iBank bugs added hours to my efforts. Deleting loan accounts and then having to recreate them, and then reenter checkbook entries to get things in balance over and over again was frustrating. (And I could not just import the data since the system has to track the relationship between the accounts properly.)

I finally got to the point where I felt that I just could not trust iBank not to throw a bug at me that could destroy all my work.

After a bit more time on it this morning, I decided to move to Moneydance.

In just about an hour, I got my most complicated accounts setup in Moneydance perfectly, first time. No bugs so far, and net worth tracking is accurate to the penny. I do wish it was Mac native, rather than Java-based. But they have done a lot to at least make it Mac friendly. It looks like Moneydance is going to do the job for me. I can tell you I already feel liberated working it in compared to iBank, just because of not having to deal with the bugs, and seeing my reports and balances make sense.

I still have not setup online bank linking or anything like that, but I am expecting it to work at least as good as iBank’s. Perhaps once I have gotten a bit farther, I’ll come back and post a bit more.

But, for now, I am with Rachel: Good-bye iBank, and hello Moneydance!

The credit card amex is setup as a credit card

The thing is when I allocated the money from the Chase account, it show funds in the Charge Rate column
when I make payments/transaction those going to the Payment column

When I received the statement to pay amex, in the Chase account the total [for example 680] is in the Payment column too, so at then end it will be all transaction + the payment = 2 times

I can send a moneydance test file or download from here

michieli.org/download/0020MichieliBooks2009.md.zip