Excellent personal finance alternative to Quicken

Any help you can get managing your finances is always useful in these troubled times. Moneydance offers an intelligent and comprehensive alternative which allows you to organize your finances, manage your budget, track your portfolio, or just automatically balance your checkbook.

Quicken Home and Business remains one of the most popular finance packages on the web but it isn’t exactly cheap meaning users are increasingly looking elsewhere to manage their finances.

While Moneydance may not feel quite as intuitive as Quicken at first, it can do pretty much everything the latter can and was actually one of the first ever financial applications on the Mac so it’s certainly not lacking in experience. When you start Moneydance, you’re offered the chance to import data from Quicken Essentials for Mac or setup a new file or account in the currency of your choice. When you’ve done so, you navigate Moneydance using the menu bar down the left hand side. It’s quite easy to get lost at first amongst all the options available so a good idea to use the Help file.

Most importantly, Moneydance supports online banking which is what will convince many users to convert to it from Quicken. You can retrieve credit card statements and bank statements from most major US banks that support OFX standards. Even better, you can use Moneydance to automatically pay your bills for you too.

Moneydance then helps you trace budgets, and reminds you of upcoming bills to keep you up-to-date. There’s handy reporting and graphing tools that should give you a little bit more perspective over where your money is going. However, there is no way to upload receipts and other financial documents related to your transactions. Its always useful to have your documents in one place although it depends on whether you scan and file your financial documents regularly.

There are some drawbacks to Moneydance. The handling of split transactions still hasn’t been improved from the 2010 version. In addition, the interface can feel a bit complicated and overwhelming at time and this isn’t helped by the fact that Moneydance is based on Java. There’s also no support for attaching documents and files such as receipts and invoices which would be useful.

Overall, Moneydance maybe isn’t quite as good as Quicken but it does offer a very competitive alternative.

Direct import of data from Quicken Essentials for Mac Completely new interface for managing downloaded transactions, designed to minimize the effort required to keep your finances up to date Additional Graphs and Reports, including a transfer report to help you analyze money flow between accounts Multi-currency improvements making life easier when managing international accounts and investments Instant access to bank websites from within the program Enhanced report printing

Changes

• Direct import of data from Quicken Essentials for Mac Completely new interface for managing downloaded transactions, designed to minimize the effort required to keep your finances up to date Additional Graphs and Reports, including a transfer report to help you analyze money flow between accounts Multi-currency improvements making life easier when managing international accounts and investments Instant access to bank websites from within the program Enhanced report printing

Personal finance can be a dull, tedious process, and Moneydance promises to take the chore away from you. The application allows you to organize your finances, manage your budget, track your portfolio, or just automatically balance your checkbook.

The program’s simple, intuitive interface makes taking care of your finances a breeze. It allows you to save time and money with online banking and bill payment. Moneydance also makes it easy to set and trace budgets, and reminds you of upcoming bills to keep you completely up-to-date.

Moneydance’s insightful reporting and graphing tools illuminate your finances and show you where your money goes. You can track your portfolio and stay on top of your investments. The application even offers encryption and password-protection to ensure your privacy.

Online banking and bill payment

Pay your bills in seconds without picking up a pen or licking a stamp. Moneydance can synchronize your records with transactions downloaded from your bank, with support for OFX, QFX, or QIF files.

Manage your budget

Moneydance makes it easy to set and manage budgets. The program compares your actual income and expenses to what you had planned and show you where your accounts are over or under budget.

Stay on schedule

It’s easy to plan ahead by scheduling recurring or future transactions including bills, loan payments, and paychecks. Moneydance shows all your upcoming or overdue bills and automatically calculates principal and interest payments for mortgages and other loans you may have.

Track your portfolio

Follow your investments and bring your portfolio into focus with support for stocks, bonds, CDs, mutual funds, and more. View the total value of your investment accounts or the performance of individual stocks and mutual funds over time. Stock splits and cost basis computations are a snap, and current prices can be downloaded automatically from the Net.

Generate useful reports and graphs, quickly

Moneydance generates a variety of reports and graphs detailing information about your accounts. Built-in reports and graphs include: Budget, missing checks, net worth, account balances, cash flow, transactions, cost basis, income vs expenses, and VAT/GST. Moneydance can remember commonly used reports and graphs and make them accessible with a single click.