For the past two years we’ve been using Moneydance for Mac as our primary financial software. And, while I still believe that Moneydance may be one of the best options out there for powerful and flexible money software… it just doesn’t work for us anymore. Here’s my brief notes on reviewing other finance software demos (iBank and Jumsoft’s Money).
One of the reasons that we need to switch from Moneydance is not actually because of anything outdated in Moneydance… but, in fact, quite the opposite – it’s because our banks apparently don’t know what QIF and QXF formats are. Both of our banks, and therefore ALL of our statements are sent in paper with limited access to PDF or XLS formats online. Frustrating. Moneydance, unfortunately has no way of importing simple CSV files (despite the claims of the text file extension, which I have tried multiple times to no avail).
So up until this point, I have been wasting a huge amount of time each month manually entering our expenses and reconciling them visually with our PDF statements. I say ‘no more’.
After looking around a bit and excluding other software for various reasons, I decided to give Money and iBank a try with the demo versions. Here’s my notes and conclusions, below.
Please note that my priorities were to find a software that…
- allows me to import CSV files with two columns for withdrawals and deposits (instead of positive and negative amounts in one column)
- makes pretty graphs and charts so that we can easily understand where all of our money is going each month
- easily tracks business-related expenses and can spit them back out in XLS to send to our accountant (tracking from a mobile is a HUGE plus)
- has a budgeting tool that is easily understandable, technically and graphically
If you have different needs from a finance software, you should take that into account when reading my evaluations.
Moneydance
- very powerful
- very ugly
- no way to import csv files easily
- no built in browser support
- charts and graphs pretty ugly
- budget tool is very confusing
- multiple currency confusing
- no mobile app
Jumsoft’s Money
- so pretty
- couple of things that should be intuitive, aren’t
- will import csv, but not withdrawals and deposits in two columns
- budgets and categories nice
- more apple friendly than Moneydance (shares with other apps)
- multiple currency easy
- iphone app available
iBank
- expensive!
- so so pretty
- iCal integration – very handy
- cash flow forecast built in
- iPhone app and dashboard widget available
- imports CSV files beautifully, complete with import rules that you can save
- does not import two column withdrawals and deposits, but you can work around by making a deposit a memo and manually fixing it later (this only works if you have a small number of deposits a month… like us)
CONCLUSIONS:
In the end, none of them have everything that we want. But we have decided to give iBank an extended trial, as it seems to be the closest thing. We’ll run the demo period out and see how many hiccups we run into. Stay tuned for an update…
If anyone has any other finance software suggestions, we won’t be making our decision until the end of the summer probably… so let us know!
Macappstorm’s reviews are always very helpful as well: Money: Finances and Banking on Your Mac | Mac.AppStorm.
update:
We decided to purchase iBank. It doesn’t have absolutely everything that we need, but I have had very good contact with the support staff about future features. We have been using it for almost 4 months, now, and we are quite happy with it.
Nice review, personally I find Money prettier, and it requires less mouse-keyboard interactions, so I’m more efficient at it, and it’s less expensive. I used iBank for a while, it’s awesome, but I like Money simplicity.