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

In my quest for new finance software I figure I just have to dive in.

iBank

I started by downloading iBank. I want to like this app. I want to like it for it’s Mac-ness. I want to like it because it looks slick. In playing around with it for a bit, it does seem to be alright. I really like all the tutorial videos on their website, as that helps you get started.

I can’t figure out how to fully import Categories. That is, if you create a new data file, you’re asked if you want to start off with a set of Home and Business accounts. I tried that, and got a fantastic starting list. When I tried exporting my old Quicken 2005 data to a QIF then importing that, I only was given my categories. I didn’t see any way to get their categories. That sucks.

As well, Quicken’s notion of “Classes” doesn’t exist. I don’t mind if someone isn’t a Quicken clone — they should be better! But that way of being able to arbitrarily group things together is so useful. For instance, I could group all the “Christmas 2010” expenses together. iBank does have a notion of “smart accounts”, and it’s possible something like that could fill the bill. But you know… if there’s some way to make it work, some way to replicate it, couldn’t their QIF importer help out with that? I mean, I imagine a Class is well defined (due to the slash character in the Category string being a delimiter).

That’s another thing on the import. It just assumes the Class is part of the category. So now I have a ton of ugly-ass category names. Ugh.

Then a strange thing. I tried playing around with the budget feature. The wizard/assistant walks you through. Oddly, the screen that lets you select the accounts to budget, when I went to the next screen it selected the inverse! For instance, if I selected checking and deselected savings, then on the next screen it assumed I wanted savings! As well, it failed to put all the categories into the list. It was just strange.

Granted, the import didn’t go all that smoothly. Most of my accounts went OK, but my main checking account, with some almost 10 years of data in it, was all messed up. I don’t know where to begin trying to fix it. I just remembered something about how there can be confusion if there are same names, like a category “cash” and an account “cash”, so I may need to do some renaming and try again.

I think what may happen here is I may have to decide if historical data is something I need to keep. I really want to keep it. It wouldn’t be horrible if I lost it, but from time to time I do like going back and being able to review charts and reports to see how things have been over the years.

I’ve sent some support email to IGG Software. We’ll see.

Moneydance

OK. I’m immediately hating Moneydance. It’s a Java app.

Granted, it actually blends into the OS fairly well, but there are still things that don’t quite work right. But well… if it has all the features and power and so on, I could deal with it. Still tho, it won’t win any awards for aesthetics.

I see it doesn’t do Envelope budgeting. There’s a way you can kinda finagle it, but man…. well, it’s not a deal-breaker, but I really wanted to try to start using this form of budgeting.

I used the same QIF file and imported it into Moneydance. First, it was MUCH faster than iBank. I don’t have numbers but I’d say Moneydance took a matter of seconds, iBank a matter of minutes. I need to look deeper to see if the import actually went smoothly, but at least I can tell the balances all look correct, so that is a good sign.

But here’s one difference. iBank doesn’t assume the QIF format is the be-all-end-all. For instance, it asked me to confirm that each account was the type it said it was and allow me to correct it. Moneydance just accepted it all as-is, and I can’t find any way to change them after the fact… but then, maybe there’s no need and I’m just being nit-picky about how I want to do things.

Hrm…. one thing I need to evaluate in all of them. How they handle loans. For instance, when I pay my mortgage, Quicken remembered it as a special transaction, so when I wrote the check it knew how to track the loan, which portion went to principal and which to interest. I wonder if these will be able to handle that. I should HOPE so, but might I have to go back and make a new account “x” transactions into it so it tracks it all correctly? not sure if that’s all in the QIF.

Moneydance seems to have something called “Tags”, which seems to equate to Quicken’s “Classes”. That’s good.

I like how with all these different groupings it totals up things with those categories/tags. That’s nice. You can just see at an easy glance how much you spent on something.

But man… the interface bugs me. Maybe it’s because I spend so much of my day writing software….

Help. Moneydance sends you online to load up a PDF. Simple enough, and looks to cover all you need. iBank’s is integrated, very Mac-like. One thing I like is that well… the general way to do Mac help is to ask questions and get specific answers. But for something as complex and feature-laden as an app like this, you really need to read. I’ll give the iBank guys some credit here for doing something very Mac-like but also very readable. I am curious why Moneydance couldn’t include the PDF as a resource within the app distribution itself and just load it up locally.

Geez. It’s really crazy that the fact Moneydance handled the import, didn’t have glaring strange bugs, and has tags/classes support… that makes me want to use it over iBank. But the fact it looks so damn ugly… I want to not use it. *sigh*  Function or form, I’m torn. 🙂

Moneywell

And so, let’s try Moneywell.

It is great all these apps provide free demos!

My initial impression? This is not an app about allowing you to manage your finances how you want to. This is an app that is geared towards personal finance that uses a budget, and specifically the envelope (bucket, in their terms) method. I think there’s nothing wrong with this, if this is what you want to do. But I don’t ONLY want to function in this rigid way of doing things, mostly because while I like the concept of envelope budgets, I don’t want to be forced into it.

Well, I think it’s slick looking and it looks like they do a very good job of managing finances using this particular approach.

But it’s not for me.

Plus I’m not sure how well it’ll cover everything that I need. But I just don’t feel much gumption to dive further into the app because of the aforementioned “mode” that it works in. Again don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great what they’re doing, it’s just not for me.

SEE Finance

And so, let’s try SEE Finance.

You know, everyone offers free downloads and demos. Everyone deals with it differently, from transaction limitations to timing out. SEE’s approach seems to be that you’re full-featured, you just get nagged for a few seconds every launch. Whatever the limitation is, I think everyone provides a reasonable way to use and evaluate the software… at least a cursory look. I have wondered if 30-days of iBank would be enough time for me to adequately evaluate it, being able to go through all my monthly bills and so on. We’ll see.

Looks like a Mac app… tho, some interface bits seem off. Again, the developer in me.

OH! I love this! I started it up, OK let’s start by importing the QIF. It says “Here’s all the categories we found” and lets me do some editing of them. The best part? I can choose to “Import and delete existing” or I can “Import and merge with existing”. NICE! I chose to merge.

Then it import does a bunch of stuff to help me try to reconcile the import and set everything as I want.

I can see they put a LOT of effort into the import process, more so than anyone. Kudos to them there.

But the kicker is, you import once. How does everything else work out?

OK… I’m looking at the GUI a bit more. Wow, they do do some stranger stuff. cmd-N for “New” is in the Edit menu. Looks like that means “New Transaction” but gee… that’s not the best way to do it. View menu isn’t standard. Transactions menu is really overloaded.

Man, I wish I could put my checking account at the top of the source list… it’s what I use the most, so having to hunt through everything in the source list isn’t fun.

Geez… no way to sort by my check number? Oh wait, there is it… I see the gear button so I can add it. I do like being able to customize the columns. But the table feels really cluttered and overloaded. 2-levels isn’t a bad thing… or maybe just a little more whitespace for the cells.

It’s not bad… but it still seems well… like it’s developing. They even version it at 0.9.12.9, so it’s not even a 1.0. Still, it looks to have great promise. If everyone could handle imports like they do, that’d be awesome. That is a gem of this app, no question. But again, you import once… and while making the switch is a very important thing, it’s all that comes after it that matters more.

What now?

I don’t know.

Moneywell is out of the running.

SEE Finance well… while it’s more Mac than Moneydance, it actually doesn’t feel as right. Moneydance doesn’t feel very Mac, but it does feel better thought out in the user interface. Moneydance also seems like it’s got a lot of power. iBank is slick, but running into bugs and being the only app that couldn’t handle the QIF import…. well, let’s say it’s a mixed first impression.

I’ll see how the IGG guys reply to things. Customer Support matters.

I’ll probably continue to evaluate Moneydance and iBank and see how it goes.

I use Quicken 2005 for the Mac to manage my finances.

It’s a love-hate relationship.

Quicken has been a long-standing icon in the field of finance management software. Long ago it was really the best player in the market. But then, Intuit started to not care. The Mac product languished and suffered, lagged way behind the Windows counterpart. There was all this talk of a new version that would cure all ills, and sure enough a new truly “native” app came out, but its feature set is way too small — “essentials” they call it, and I guess if all you need to do is track your checkbook and credit cards it’s fine. But if you do more, like I do, it doesn’t cut it.

Let’s not forget how crappy the interface is. If nothing else, the fact it wants to use cmd-A — a reserved keystroke for ‘Select All’ — to bring up the Accounts window? Argh. And then there’s still no way to Select All to ease editing. Arrow keys are handled in a non-standard way. Oh, the list could go on. So it’s just a pain to use, but there’s really been no good alternative. And as much as you want to hate it, there’s no question they had the legacy behind them that enabled the software to really have a lot of details right. Sure, the user experience might suck, but they knew how to do reports, graphs, and really generally manage money in the right way.

While it’s obviously the oldest piece of software I own and I’ve had zero reason or desire to upgrade well… if the rumors are true that PowerPC emulation “Rosetta” is going away in Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” then Quicken 2005 will no longer work for me and I must upgrade or switch. Trouble is, upgrading to the latest Quicken is not an option.

So what is?

I’m starting to look around at alternatives and here’s what I find:

• iBank
• Moneydance
• Moneywell
• SEE Finance
• GnuCash

I’ve been spending the past few days reading up and trying to see what might be right for me.

I have no idea. 🙂

For every report of X is good, you get a report that X is bad. That Y imported all my years of Quicken data without a hiccup, that Y totally botched everything up. That Z lacks this feature, that Z is great because it does this.

It’s really just hard to tell what will or won’t be good, and I get the feeling that no matter what I try, I’m somehow going to be left unsatisfied. That the process of switching is going to take months. That I might download and try an import, but then I’ll probably need to use both Quicken and the new software side-by-side for a while to see how they do.. at least a month, maybe more, to run through the normal course of monthly bills and transactions to see how it does for things.

Some preliminary biases.

iBank I want to like. It seems cool. It’s truly a Mac app, with Mac people, and trying to be Mac. I like that. I like the fact it’s a small shop and trying hard. But with that, it also means that they’re a little slow to get things developed because finance software is non-trivial. Still, iBank 4 appears to strive to address many of the complaints I’ve read about, so maybe by now it’s become rather robust enough that it’d be good to use.  I also really want to try out this “envelope” system of budgeting.

Moneydance I don’t want to like because it’s Java. Not that I don’t like Java, but it means there’s going to be weirdness in how it works and exists. But it’s also a bonus that it works on Windows and Linux because you know they are striving to write for a large audience, and with a larger audience that means a lot more coverage, a lot more dealing with bugs, features, and improvements and so on. They sound like a responsive company and trying to do well. A lot of people also like how well Moneydance handles reports and investment tracking, so that’s a plus. I’ve dealt with Quicken’s strange interface issues for years so I’m sure I could learn to live with this.

Moneywell seems cool, but I’m not sure it has enough of the features I need, like investment tracking.

SEE Finance… hard to say. Haven’t spent much time looking at it yet.

GnuCash. Well… I like open source and all, but I’m not sure I want to bother going here right now. But the open source advantage is undeniable because it makes me wonder about one very key thing:

Exit Strategy.

See, if I need to move away from Quicken now, what about in the future? What if whatever I choose ends up going belly-up and now I’m left hanging? Is there a good strategy for being able to get all my data OUT of their app so I can move it somewhere else? That perhaps uses a better solution than QIF files? To me, this is key. Sure once I find the right software I’ll be a loyal customer until I’m given reason to not… but having worked in professional software development for over 15 years I know that data is king to the customer and we need to always allow them to preserve and move their data around freely. That things can happen that cause us and our apps to have to come and go, but we can’t let the user’s data become inaccessible. So what’s their strategy? That will be a very key factor in my decision.

Another small point is being able to do multiple totally separate accounting practices. That is, sure this is mostly for personal finance, but I also want to be able to track Hsoi Enterprises LLC financials there (i.e. small business). That means I can have totally separate data files for personal and for business. That means I can at least do simple and basic things for taxes, reporting, etc.. And that I can export the data in a way that my accountant can handle it.

I know about things like Mint.com too. But I’m going to be honest. I’m sore at Intuit. I don’t feel they’ve treated their Mac customers right for many many years. I feel they jerked us around, neglected us, treated us like crap, and all out of the arrogance of “where else you gonna go?”. I really don’t want to give them my money any more. Plus, something about putting all my personal finance information in one place like that… just waiting for a data breach. Call me paranoid, but I just don’t feel like I want to do that. YMMV.

But whatever I do, I need to start doing it now. It’s going to take a long time to evaluate stuff. Heck I just thought… what I might do is continue doing online research and settle on the top 2 or 3 apps. Then download and run ALL of them simultaneously and see how it goes. Yes it will mean a month or two of pain because my bill paying sessions may take 2-3x as long to deal with, but this may give me a better chance to really compare these guys head to head.

We’ll see. 🙂

If you have any experience with or comments about these, please comment.