I’ve been trying some particular finance software packages and have a little more to report.

The iBank people did eventually get back to me, so turnaround time is reasonable. Speaking as a developer myself, if a customer asks how to or if you can do something and the software can’t, I’d put it down on the feature list for a future version. No promise it will happen, but it’s still valuable (potential) customer feedback towards improving your product. Hopefully they did that (no indication in their response that they did, but that’s not too surprising lest the person take it as a promise it will happen).

Trouble is, I’m finding that if iBank can’t handle my data import, I just don’t have the gumption to walk through 10 years of records to fix the problem. I don’t have that sort of time. One could argue that I should start fresh, but that’s easier said than done in terms of how I like keeping my data as well as having access to it. I mean, Quicken is dead to me so I need to get my data out of it and into a form I can easily manage and manipulate, not just some archived QIF that I can’t directly view.

So I’ve been spending a lot more time with Moneydance.

Damnit. I don’t want to like the app. It’s Java roots make it…. well… quirky. I can click to display a menu (or right-click for a contextual menu) then if I don’t select something from the menu it sticks around. Worse, it’s implemented as some sort of “floats above everything” hack and so I can switch to a whole other application and the menu sticks around! There’s so many other little interface quirks and strange behaviors, it’s driving me nuts.

But by the same token, there is a lot of stuff they do that’s right. For instance, I’m growing more fond of single-window type apps, and there’s no question Moneydance took a direct nod from Mac apps in how they approached and designed this, including using the “source list” on the left. So OK the interface itself is quirky, but the logic behind the interface is not. It’s actually pretty well thought out, in my book. It’s implemented as a “double-entry bookkeeping” which means things like categories are technically “accounts” and thus there’s a lot more interesting things you can do with them instead of just having a category be a simple label.

It seems to be doing everything right. It seems to provide almost all I want. OK, so no “envelope budgeting”, but it does do budgeting. There’s online support. It’s all there.

I’m still evaluating it, still going through docs, experimenting, exploring, but so far Moneydance appears to be the front-runner. The other thing? When I Google around for information, comparisons, reviews… no one is 100% awesome, but Moneydance gets a lot of love and not that much negative about it. Most of the negative I read deals with the GUI/Java-ness of it, and that it messed up their QIF import… but messing up QIF imports seems to be something that plagues everyone to some degree. Still, that bodes pretty well for Moneydance, to hear such generally positive things about it.

All this talk of accountancy. Makes me think of the Crimson Permanent Assurance