Moneydance

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