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

I m trying to work in MD using envelope budget

I setup IncomeCashPool to pay the CC amex So I put 600$ for this month in the payment

When I open the CC there a -600$ balance

Then when I enter the transactions in the CC the balance grow and looks I have to pay 2 times

How should I setup this system?

see sample in a spreadsheet

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=poc8aVUUzzBqX8BeT14UUUw&hl=en

@Ted: Moneydance would be worth a look. It’s stable, it works properly and has plenty of features. My main criticism would be the charts which aren’t terribly attractive – but they do the job.

So given that background, I downloaded iBank this weekend and gave it a run through. Unfortunately it doesn’t hold a candle to Quicken’s reporting and data entry features. Specifically:

* negative balances must be entered for credit card accounts because of a lack of 2-column system for debits and credits
* matching transactions between accounts isn’t offered – i.e. when I transfer funds from my bank account to my Visa account, I have to manually remove the duplicate transaction
* report date ranges are difficult to implement using the month/day/year convention, a pop up calendar would be much better
* reports don’t sum transactions by account type, instead all transactions are grouped as account types are added; for example there is no simple way to view how much I spent in total on Dining in a given month by Visa, debit card etc.
* further to this, reports have lost any dynamic functionality, a feature I use often in Quicken; for instance, in Quicken I can easily right click on any item in a report to find out more information about it or to build a sub report specific to that transaction type
* the payee-category relationship isn’t ‘learned’ by the software to enable future autofill of categories for that payee; instead each payee has to be set up as a ‘Smart Import Rule’

It seems that my choices going forward are to either stick with Quicken on XP, wait for Quicken on the Mac, or try Moneydance. Based on the relatively positive reviews on this blog (thanks Rachel!) I just might give it a go.