Moneydance - Cross-Platform Personal Finance

sreilly self-promotes: "Moneydance 2003 has just been released for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. This program is a completely cross-platform replacement for Quicken or MS Money. This is the first time that online banking and online bill payment has been available in a made-for-Linux application. It also has features that aren't available in Quicken such as an extension mechanism that lets developers easily add and distribute new features to the program."

Why not use Gnucash?

[Gothmolly]

See subject.

And from the Open Source corner...

[CWCarlson]

I direct your attention to GnuCash [gnucash.org].

I've never used it, but it certainly seems like a worthy contender.

Re:Not for me

[jsled]

GnuCash can, actually. You can define arbritary commodities and currencies... keep the exchange rate up to date, &c.

USD, CND, EUR ... LSW? ;)

Re:And from the Open Source corner...

[petabyte]

I'm currently looking into using GNUcash and so far its pretty impressive. I used to work for a company maintaining data in Quickbooks and eventually in MS Money. GNUCash is very capable against both of these programs for your average home user. Their webpage does list the goal of adding business features in the future.

What I think GNUCash is missing most of all, however, is cross platform compatblity. I know it handles QIF files but the program itself has not been ported to Windows or MacOS yet. Many people these days have multiple OSes and I don't want have to reboot my machine in order to balance my checkbook (this arguement applies to both MS Money and Quicken as well).

GNUCash has alot of potential and I might just start using it with the hope that cross-compatablity comes later. :)

Uhh... wrong

[randombit]

How about Mozilla? I've been doing all of my banking, and paying my credit card bills, over HTTP/SSL for ~2 years now. Which is exceptionally nice as my bank is a local credit union about 3000 miles away from my current place of residence.

If online banking with Linux is causing people problems, I would highly recommend finding a bank that supports doing this kind of thing over the web.

I've been using it for a year...

[loosifer]

...but only on OS X. We bought it because of it's cross-platform capabilities, but never ended up taking advantage of them.

The features are pretty good, in that I don't often want to scream at it and torch the hardware it's running on, like I do most software I use. My wife does most of the finances (whew!), and she seems to like it. I can't compare it to Quicken or whatever, because I haven't used them, but we always import our Quicken-formatted bank statements into MoneyDance with no problems.

Sorry I can't provide a more helpful review, but I just wanted to drop a "Hey, I'm using it, and it's at least decent" note, since no one else appears to have actually used it.

Re:Impressive

[sreilly]

lashdotted with 2 comments. Look, if you are promoting your own project, there is no excuse for a slashdotting. Be prepared next time you submit your PR piece.

Unfortunately, the FreeBSD box it is hosted on keeps rebooting.

Can I install the client on multiple machines without an additional license? Does it work with Bank of America seemlessly (ie, I don't have to futz about with dl'ing the transactions manually). Can I import Quicken 2003 data? How much does it cost? What libraries did you use for the cross platform work?

multiple machines, one license: yes

bank of america: yes

import q2003 data: yes

cost: 29.99

libraries: java - jsse, jce, etc

Re:And from the Open Source corner...

[jsled]

It has been ported to OSX, and is distributed as part of fink, IIRC.

Yup; recent, but there: http://fink.sourceforge.net/pdb/package.php/gnucas h

Moneydance

[Craig Maloney]

I thought I'd weigh in on this discussion since a lot of folks seem to be unfamiliar with the history of this application. MoneyDance dates to a time before when the only other options for Linux were a package written in TCL, and XAccount/GNUCash. At the time $20 bought a license for the application. Having wanted a finance application that worked well, I happily registered my copy and used it for years. The AppGen decided they needed a personal finance component and purchased MoneyDance from the author Sean Reilly. AppGen then had trouble after the dot com boom/bust, and MoneyDance was the first to suffer. People found out the hard way that they had purchased an unsupported product. For the longest time AppGen just sat on the code, letting it rot in secret while people wondered out loud when new fixes and changes would be released. I have since moved to GnuCash for my finances, but I applaud Sean for getting the code and releasing new versions of MoneyDance again. It really is a wonderful program to use, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it for anyone who would like another option in personal finance management.

From the home page

[Lerxst Pratt]

The world's most intuitive personal finance software just got better! Moneydance 2003, the groundbreaking new financial tool is now available for all platforms. Moneydance can be trusted to keep all of your financial information safe, organized, and at your fingertips. After just a few minutes with Moneydance's simple interface and powerful features, you will wonder how you ever got along without it.

Protect your privacy - and your peace of mind With Moneydance, you will not be bombarded with advertisements on your desktop, nor have your personal information shared without your explicit consent. Unlike some other applications, Moneydance does not install third party software on your computer to monitor or restrict your activities.

Online banking and bill payment: no paper? no problem Pay your bills in seconds without writing a single check. With Moneydance you can automatically synchronize your records with transactions downloaded from your bank. Moneydance currently can perform online banking and bill payment with hundrededs of financial institutions. Moneydance also integrates nicely with the Paytrust online bill payment service.

Manage your budget Moneydance lets you easily create and manage multiple budgets and shows you where your accounts over or under budget. Simply specify how much you expect to earn or spend in each category for a given time interval (weekly, monthly, yearly). Moneydance can then show you a comparison of how your budget compares to your actual income and expenses for any time period.

Stay on schedule The ability to schedule recurring or future transactions in Moneydance makes it easy to plan for bills, loan payments, and paychecks. On the starting screen Moneydance shows all of your upcoming or overdue reminders, and you can view future and past reminders for any month. Special loan payment reminders automatically calculate principal and interest payments for mortgages and other loans. You can even print a monthly calendar that includes your scheduled items.

Visualize your wealth Another great reason to use Moneydance is that it lets you easily visualize your finances. With Moneydance's built-in graphs you can view your accounts from many angles. The Net Worth graph allows you to view the total value of all of your accounts over time. The Expenses graph provides a clear picture of where your money is going and when. Other graphs include Account Balance, Currency History, Income vs Expenses, and more. Moneydance can also remember commonly used graphs so that they are accessible with a single click from the main screen.

Get the details, quickly Moneydance provides a variety of reports detailing information about your accounts. Built-in reports include: Budget, Missing Checks, Net Worth, Account Balances, Cash Flow, Detailed Cash Flow, Transactions, Cost Basis, and VAT/GST. You can also tell Moneydance to remember commonly used reports so that they are accessible with a single click from the main screen.

International ease If you ever cross national borders you will appreciate Moneydance's built-in support for multiple currencies. Recording international transfers is a breeze - simply specify the amount and the currency, and Moneydance will automatically calculate the value in the context of the current account. You can download Up-to-date exchange rates from the Internet automatically with the OandA.com exchange rate updater extension.

Compatible, standards-based reliability Moneydance uses industry standard technologies such as OFX, QIF, SSL/TLS, Java, and XML to ensure compatibility with other software and services. In addition, with our open API and Extension Developer Kit you can be sure that third parties will always be able to integrate their services with Moneydance.

Understand your portfolio Today's investment portfolios are as complicated as ever. Moneydance can bring your investements into focus with support for tracking stocks, bonds, CDs, mutual funds, and more. The investment account overview sho

DebtMinder

[NetMasta10bt]

I'm not affliated with DebtMinder [ithinksolutions.com]. But I think it's an interesting solution to debt management that I'm not sure if the other 'checkbook' software have covered or not.

From Freshmeat:
Debt Minder is a specialized tool for debt management. It is user friendly, complete, functional, and economical, and considers account subtleties such as introductory APRs, varying interest rates, split interest rates, external payments, and more. Its visualization capabilities include pie charts, line graphs, bar charts, area graphs, debt to income ratios, and colored payoff tables. An integrated amortization calculator for American and Canadian methods is included, and payoff schedules can be exported to XML, CSV, and tab delimited files

It's Java based, and so runs on anything under the Sun ;)

System requirements and download link

[lorcha]

System requirements for MoneyDance (according to their website):
64 Megabytes of RAM
Windows 95 or higher
166 Mhz or higher Processor

Apparently those requirements won't cut it for your webserver, eh?

Anyhow, I am downloading it right now and they are serving at ~ 10K/sec even though their front page just ain't loadin'. If you just want to try to download the thing, just point the 'ol browser here [moneydance.com] (windows version) and give 'em a try. :-)

Re:Why not use Gnucash?

[Chilltowner]

That's a shame. It can take a little while to get used to double-entry bookkeeping, but once you grok it, GnuCash really makes things sing. I've used GnuCash since 1.4.x, and it's still the best thing I've tried (including Quicken). You can get away with just using the checkbook type register to do simple finances. Really, the beauty of GnuCash is that it allows itself to be as simple or as complicated as you need it. I started using it for simple finances, and now I also run my consulting business on it. It's been great for both.

You can download transactions to it, too, in reply to one of the parent posts. Bill paying isn't in yet, but things seem to be moving along pretty well in that direction. Plus, the users mailing list is really active and helpful, so there's no need to bang heads.

Links to installs

[Lerxst Pratt]

Links to installs:

Linux/x86/glibc2.1+
http://moneydance.com/download/2003/Unix/moneydanc e_linux_i386_jre131.tar.gz [moneydance.com]

SuSE 7.2 RedHat 7.1 Mandrake 8.0
http://moneydance.com/download/2003/Unix/moneydanc e_linux_i386_jre130.tar.gz [moneydance.com]

Linux/ppc
http://moneydance.com/download/2003/Unix/moneydanc e_linux_ppc_jre130.tar.gz [moneydance.com]

FreeBSD/x86
http://moneydance.com/download/2003/Unix/moneydanc e_freebsd_i386_jre118_elf.tar.gz [moneydance.com]

Solaris/x86
http://moneydance.com/download/2003/Unix/moneydanc e_sunos_i386_jre130.tar.gz [moneydance.com]

Solaris/sparc
http://moneydance.com/download/2003/Unix/moneydanc e_sunos_sparc_jre130.tar.gz [moneydance.com]

Other
http://moneydance.com/download/2003/Unix/moneydanc e_other.tar.gz [moneydance.com]

Re:I won't pay bills online ...

[robklaus]

If you want to dispute the charges, for whatever reason, the cash is gone from your account until the dispute is resolved - if ever. This is unlike a credit card where the credit card company takes the risk. With online bill paying or debit cards, you take all the risk. So, if someone rips you off, well, you eat it!!

I have to disagree with you here. If your debit card says "Visa" in the lower right hand corner, you are in fact protected: http://www.usa.visa.com/personal/cards/visa_check. html

The missing app

[jhr0771]

I have my laptop running only Linux for almost 2 years but I had to go always to my wife's machine (Windows2000) to use M$Money. The features I use the most are the recurring transaction reminders and the report about the future balance of the account based on those reminders. I haven't found any alternative until now. I tried MoneyDance yesterday(a preview) and it works great ! and with the extension of Balance Predicter(it needs a litle bit more work), I'm leaving definitly M$ !.

Re:Tracking money is wrong.

[gimple]

My wife and I use this software--Money Matters. [crown.org] It budgets exactly as you describe. It has helped us truly manage our money.

Re:Why not use Gnucash?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.gnucash.org/docs/C/gnucash-guide/

Re:Why not use Gnucash?

[Chilltowner]

The link posted by the AC is very good. There's also a PDF [object-refinery.com] which is a pretty concise walk through the basic features (pre-1.8, but still very useful).

Also, when you start GnuCash for the first time, there's a "Druid" that will walk you through and help you get your accounts downloaded and set up.

Not quite

[benoitg]

Clearly you don't know the problems surrounding the qif format very well.
-I can't be used as the main save format of an app, because of the lack of a transaction ID field. Quicken sure as hell doesn't use it as it's file format, only an import-export format.
-There is no definitive spec on the file format available from intuit. All the docs available are listed here http://libofx.sourceforge.net/links.html and the most complete certainly isn't intuit's. Even the account type identifiers sometimes change depending on the language of your Quicken (examples for example, !Type:Bank becomes |Type:Banque in french Quicken 2000)

Re:Thanks but no thanks

[tramm]

Drunken Coward wrote:

I'll wait until something free (as in beer and speech) before I think it's secure enough for my data, thanks.

How about GNU Cash [gnucash.org]? I've been using it for almost two years now and am very, very pleased with it. It is GPLed, so it is both free beer and speech.

The new business features allowed me to replace SQL-Ledger [sql-ledger.org] with it. I'm happily generating invoices and handling payroll with GNU Cash 1.8.2 now.

Macworld reviewed Moneydance 3.2

[Disoriented]

The review is online here. [macworld.com]

Not a great review, but maybe 2003 addresses some of the concerns raised here.

Re:What if you do not use Gnome?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably you'd also have to downgrade a few of your system libraries to get Gnucash working. It's quite picky about having the exact versions of about 30 libraries.

Honestly, I'd never use Gnucash because someday down the road I might need to access that data and be unable to get Gnucash running again on the "OS of the future". It's hard enough to get it running now.

Appgen, Moneydance, and other things

[The Breeze]

I am so confused.

Appgen used to make Moneydance - did they buy it from Sean Reiley, and then sell it back? Moneydance has always had a decent reputation and has been around since 1998 as far as I know, quite possibly longer.

Appgen makes MyBooks...I've been trying that off and on for two years..quite cool in that it is cheap, source code is available (no GPL tho) for extra $$$, and it runs on Linux, Mac & Windows, and the licenses are good for any mix of machines...a 5 user license will run on a Linux server with Mac, Windows, and Linux clients all at the same time...quite uncool in that it's rather unpolished in places and awkward to use at times, and getting the thing to print invoices is a royal pain.
You can use Appgen's scripting language to make invoices, but the program was originally designed to print invoices on pre-printed forms. Yuck.

Appgen sales-types are helpful and eager to let tech support help people who are evaluating, and they say that they were writing big accounting apps on UNIX heavy metal for 20 years or so. I don't know, I'm a bit worried about the rumors in this thread about Appgen's finances. I am still considering purchasing MyBooks but am in no rush.

GNUCash is a joke. I had no problem using it as of release 1.4 for personal finances, and I've heard it's quite feature rich now at 1.8. A joy to use. The problem is it's practically impossible to install. GNUCash has a reputation for being the epitome of dependancy hell. I'm sorry, I love hacking around as much of the next person but 60+ shared libraries is too much for me. At one point the website actually said "Don't try to install this unless your distribution comes with it". Sigh. A wonderful product, GNUcash, if you can actually get it to work. I'm at the point now where I need my computer to actually work and spending hours trying to solve the dependancies for GNUCash is too much. I cannot understand why they put so much work into something that is so difficult to install.

I'm thinking about taking SQL Ledger for a spin, a bit troubled by comments some of its developers made a while back thinking that user security wasn't that big a deal, but looks like a nifty product...

There's a site out there run by some guy that has about 15 accounting programs both GPL & propietary...I can't find it tho...

Anyhow...just rambling - if anyone can post the history of both Appgen & Moneydance I'm sure that others besides myself would appreciate it.