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."

Thanks but no thanks

[Drunken Coward]

I'm not going to trust my personal finances to a company that refuses to release their code under the GPL. Who knows what kind of data this software is gathering, not to mention the fact that I've never even heard of this company. If I don't use Microsoft Money because of these issues, why would I use something presented by an even less reputed source?

And forget auditing it myself, with an EULA that says:

You may not reverse engineer, decompile, translate, adapt, or disassemble the Software, nor shall you attempt to create the source code from the object code for the Software.

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

How new is this version?

[Evangelion]

I tried the current moneydance out a few weeks ago, and it simply Didn't Work. After entering a few transactions, modifying one of them caused it to hang, and eventually crap out with the good 'ol NullPointerException.

If it's improved in the last few weeks, I might give it another shot, but only because GNUCash doesn't run on Windows.

no thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

I checked this out once. Looked usable, though a little lackluster. I'm sure the newer version has improvements.

However I didn't download it or evaluate it because of an obnoxious license clause that said I waive all rights to a jury trial and agree to arbitrate all claims. Is that clause still there? (Can't tell because apparently they run their web site on a cell phone or something).

Although I don't anticipate being affected by that clause, I find it extremely arrogant that I give up a basic constitutional right just so I can balance my checkbook.

Also, as a poster above mentioned, I'd like to have the source code. This isn't rocket science, this implements basic accounting concepts which are 100s of years old. I have come across several annoying bugs in Quicken in the past and have decided that something as basic and essential as financial software should be delivered as source code. I'd also like to see how values are computed (rounded, fixed-point, etc).

Gnucash for me, thanks.

OK, so I finally got through

[dacarr]

One thing that would be very nice to see is some sort of list of financial institutions that this has been checked with and that compatibility can be assured. At the very least, at least the software compatibilities for the financial institutions' back ends.

Don't forget about Kapital

[martinde]

There is also Kapital [thekompany.com] from The Kompany [thekompany.com]. And gnucash, which is linked in other replies. And CrossOver Office [codeweavers.com], which supports Quicken.

So has anyone had good or bad online banking experience with any of these? I think all of them but gnucash are supposed to support it. I'd like to see a comparative review...

How robust is the database?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

I'm using one commercial product now which regularly gets its database corrupted even in brand-new files built from scratch. Sometimes it crashes when I try to back it up.

Never mind which product. I've heard the other one is worse anyway.

It's not just me. A Google(tm) search revealed that this has been a problem for years.

So -- what does Moneydance have on the back end? Can I trust it not to fail unrecoverably just before tax time? Are there repair facilities if something goes wrong? Do they work? Can I export to some simple text or XML format that I can inspect and patch if need be?

Re:Why not use Gnucash?

[slide-rule]

Probably "ease of use". I have yet to see this new-fangled thing yet. In the meantime, I've been very slowly brewing up something I can use myself (no, it isn't far enough along to matter to anyone else yet; yes, it'd be GPL'ed or something else "open" if it does get there). I've looked at gnucash each time the next even-number comes out. It looks nice if you need to do small-business stuff, but for just my personal finances, I could never get far enough along after hours of banging my head against it to get anything set up and useable. So... if the new app looks like it'll be as easy and intuitive (to me) to use, I might give it a shot. That's what I would reply to your question with. (On the matter of rolling my own, gnucash doesn't have things I'd call simple and necessary yet for personal finance tracking that, having used in MS Money, are quite simply deal-breakers for me to not have available.)

MyBooks Profeesional

[mao che minh]

This software, from Appgen (http://www.appgen.com), was the deciding factor in moving two small businesses to Linux for me. MyBooks Pro is the bomb - it imported their QuickBooks Pro files and records in no time. The licenses are also very cheap.

This application is the real deal. Oh, by the way, it works on both Linux and Mac OS 10.x

Re:Don't forget about Kapital

[Doc Hopper]

I have a great deal of experience with Quicken under Linux using Codeweavers Wine (the actual Crossover Office product, which I bought largely to run Quicken). It does just fine for the basic checkbook management thing, but there is one huge usability bug that's a show-stopper for me. If you try to enter a "split" (itemize a transaction), and any of the splits have a negative value (like transfer to another account via the split) Quicken crashes hard. Doesn't happen on Windows, but all the time on Linux under CXOffice.

In case you're interested in repeating the experiment, try setting up a house payment with all the correct accounts:
Asset: Escrow
Debt: Home Loan
Cash Flow: Checking

Set up payment from Checking to Home Loan for $900.00 (or whatever your house payment is). Then in House Payment, split that transfer into Principal (positive number), Interest (negative number), and Escrow (negative number). Click OK on Split window, BOOM! Down it goes. I use this technique all the time. Watching the Windows display, I think the Intuit folks actually do some goofiness with swapping the background window over to the account to which the negative transfer goes, and that may be the cause of the crash. In any case, happens every time on my two Linux machines.

The help is also broken, and I still rely on that a ton whenever I'm doing something new. You basically get blank screens on about half the help menu items. Some are populated, some aren't. It's very weird.

Other things that seem to be lacking in MoneyDance and GNUCash that I use all the time (I haven't tried either in about a year, though, so they may be updated):

* Most "planning" features, particularly setting up payment schedules automatically for debt reduction plans. My wife and I are on-track to get our house paid off in 9 years (only 5 years into the mortgage now), and it's largely due to this planning in Quicken.
* Automatic import into TurboTax. May not seem like a big deal, but when you run several businesses and hire an external tax preparation specialist, it's helpful if everything is in Quicken already that you can hand them a floppy disk with your TurboTax data for them to import into their whatever-program.
* Tax categories for just about everything under the sun, updated annually. I only use a handful of them, but when I know that a particular transaction is going to be a type of thing to end up on one of my forms at the end of the year, I can create a category for it and WOW! it appears on that form from TurboTax at the end of the year.
* Superb graphing & reporting. One-click graphs of where our money goes, easy reporting if we're on our debt reduction/savings plan targets, etc.

Admittedly, those features may be present in MoneyDance or GNUCash now. But they are definitely show-stoppers if I don't have them. And due to the bug in CXOffice, Quicken under Linux is really a non-starter at the moment, except when I need to glance at my finances. I regularly back up my data from my Windows machine, and import it into my GNU/Linux Quicken to I have the information available on my laptop in GNU/Linux all the time.

Really, the automated import stuff is a non-issue for me. I download a .qif just about daily from my credit union, import it, and match what's cleared. Takes about two minutes total (as long as I've kept up, if I'm a few days behind it takes a bit longer to check for matches), then I'm done for the day. End of the month, we review our numbers, see if we need to adjust the family budget to account for something, and get on with our lives. I wasted a HUGE amount of time learning the thing when we first bought it, though, in large part because I was trying to work around problems running it under Crossover Office on my GNU/Linux machines. I eventually mostly gave up, installed Windows XP on one of my home boxes, and just use that box for gaming & Quicken now.

Hope that answers the question! I'm eager to give MoneyDance anot

Tracking money is wrong.

[uberdave]

The problem I have with all of these money management softwares is that they have pathetic budgetting features, if they have them at all. Quicken, Gnucash, etc are great at tracking your money after you have spent it. However, the point of money management is not in tracking how it is spent, but in projecting and planning what *future* spending is going to be. I don't want to find out at the end of the month that I am short by $50. I want to find out at the beginning of the month that my projected spending is going to put me $50 in the hole. That way, I can cut back on something so that I don't wind up with too much month left at the end of my paycheck.

What I would like to see is limits on spending categories. For example: You decide that you are going to spend $100 on gas. Suddenly you have to go way out of town. When you enter the gas receipts and the total comes up to $120, there should be a warning dialog: "You have exceeded your allowable spending in this category." From there you would have to allocate funds from other spending categories (say dining out expenses) to cover the excess. The software should warn you that you need to cut back, and where you can cut back, (based on how you planned to spend the money originally) so that you don't spend more than you earn.

The bottom line is that you can't spend more than you have, and looking at where your money went will not help. You have to manage where your money is going to go.

Quicken's file format is open, write to it, dammit

[aquarian]

FYI, Quicken's .qif file format is wide open, a de facto standard that anyone can write to. I don't understand why more developers don't take advantage of this fact. If you're writing a new Quicken-replacement program you should just use it, rather than reinvent the wheel -- whether your product is commercial, GPL, or whatever. You can download the .qif spec from Intuit.

Intuit has more incentive to keep their file formats open becuase what keeps Quicken and especially Quickbooks going is the ability for developers to create add ons. Quickbooks has a whole industry of add-on developers. By using the .qif standard, you can plug into this community too. The more stuff your product will interface with, the more attractive it will be, be it commericial, GPL, or whatever.

Re:Thanks but no thanks

[JustAnotherReader]

I'm not going to trust my personal finances to a company that refuses to release their code under the GPL

Quicken and MS Money both send their data to the financial institution as XML is a format known as "Open Financial Exchange" or simply OFX

Since OFX is an open standard and the data is encrypted via SSL then all this product is doing is taking data you enter via a GUI and converting it to an OFX message. I say "only" but in fact that's quite a lot of work.

I've been involved in writing the receiving end of this software at a major Californian bank and it's kind of nice that most of our work is aimed at meeting the OFX specification. If your product can work with that spec then certifying it with Quicken and MS Money is not too difficult.

BTW, on a funny note, while Intuit has quite an extensive QA process that we must go through to get our software certified to work with Quicken, Microsoft's certification consist of "Do you work with Quicken? Great, you're certified"

Re:Impressive

[JourneymanMereel]

Does it to graphing/categorization similar to Quicken? Even though it's disappointing to see all those graphs that show my networth to be somewhere below the line of 0, it's something I've come to like.

Also, does it work with Discover Card and/or Citibank?

Does it have a Palm/Pocket PC/Handheld Linux component?

Last but not least, does it syncronize with any kind of webbased application?

Still missing?

[dbitter1]

I wrote my own financial DB- not pretty, but it handles a few things I haven't seen seemlessly implemented in _ANY_ financial program, commercial or otherwise:

• Multiple currencies: If I get a receipt in CHF or EUR, I want to put _that_ number in and calculate the balance (or exchange rate, pick one) appropriately
• Multiple dates: If I do a transfer from one bank to another, there is an issue date (when I do it), a transaction date (when it actually occurs) and a reconcile date (when I see the money). Most programs will change both transactions if you change one. Using sets of dates allows keeping of the referential integrity as well as multiplicity...
• Statment Balance Date: I can run a query (yeah, it's just a GROUP BY statement, but can the big boys do it?) that tells me my balance each month. Sounds simple, but what if you screw up putting in a date- you can check each month's statement to find what month is now unreconciled
• Ad-hoc Queries:If all I want is the data, a wizard sucks compared to a few SQL statements. Did Quicken come up with an ODBC driver to their proprietary format?

don't blow it

[thvv]

I have used Quicken for a dozen years. Originally it was a wonderful product, easy to use, helpful, and simple. Over time it has

• bloated with a sink full of dubious features
• had worse and worse support
• come out with almost yearly cosmetic releases
• abandoned Mac support

I have been planning to go to OS X and I am glad to hear that I won't have to buy another Quicken.

Before I buy, there are two issues I will need answers to. One was already mentioned: database robustness. Quicken went through some rough times with corruption before they came up with repair procedures that were effective and safe.

The other is check printing. If you can print on 3-up checks, great.. but how do you print other than three at a time? This is a horrible mess, depends on all kinds of obscure stuff that changes with every combination of OS and printer. Quicken's method of aligning and printing checks on dot matrix printers was one of the things that helped it succeed early. But debugging this stuff on hundreds of printer models will be tedious and costly. I suggest that you create a user discussion board where people can share their experience on this sub-topic.

For PalmOS handhelds, PocketMoney

[Anonymous Coward]

PocketMoney, from Catamount Software [catamount.com].

The manual lists these scenarios for using PocketMoney with external applications:

• Desktop is Main, PocketMoney Mirrors Desktop
• Desktop is Main, PocketMoney Holds Balances, Omits Detailed Transactions
• PocketMoney is Main, Desktop Mirrors PocketMoney

According to the manual, the software's author uses the last scenario. In other words, he uses PocketMoney to manage his finances and downloads data to Quicken in order to generate pretty graphs.

PM2QIF [sourceforge.net] is a Perl Script for converting PocketMoney databases to QIF files. It was specifically written for use with GNUCash.

Stop bitch'n

[mpechner]

I've haven't kept a physical checkbook in years. I've trusted Quicken up until 2002. The new reconciliation feature was done is a really piss poor manor.

I changed to MoneyDance because I just wanted a check registry. Something that read QIF files that i downloaded from my bank.

It has worked great and has been around for years.

The parent company does a full bookkeeping application.

Be happy that there is company out there doing quality financial software that does not require you pay the Microsoft Tax on the OS.

Re:Thanks but no thanks

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I really don't understand where you went with that.

My point is that when the product is given at no charge, there's no incentive for the author to give in to the user base's demands. If I am selling a product with 10 features for $300, and the prospective market asks for 15 features for $200, I might give in as it's another $200 in my pocket. If a free product has 10 features and the users want another 5, it doesn't matter. Beggars can't be choosy.

I won't work for free and I won't program for free, and I don't see how I can rightfully demand that someone else to give their work or programs away for free.

Contact Intuit (maker of quicken) for a Linux port

[rleibman]

I just sent a quick note to Intuit begging for a Linux port.
Please contact them at "http://www.intuit.com/company/contact_us/index.ht ml [intuit.com]" and give them every reason you can think of.
I've been a MS money user since version 1.0 (it came free and I've been paying for upgrades since), and use quickbooks for business, but I can't stand having to reboot to windows to do it.
The past few days I've been attempting to move to gnucash, it has a LONG way to go, it can't even print 3-to-a-page checks easily!
I know Intuit is far from open source, but the unavailability of a good money management package is one more reason why people don't use Linux.