Filed under: Software, Productivity
Moneydance 2006 - cross-platform finance management
Moneydance 2006 (awkward name and all) is a well-rounded personal finance app with a nice selection of features including: online banking and bill payment, budget management, recurring transactions, investment tracking, report generation, Quicken/Money import, database encryption and a whole lot more.
It might be missing a few features when compared to big dogs like Quicken 2006, but it's priced accordingly: a license is $30 no matter what OS(es) you need it for, and when I say cross-platform, I mean it: Moneydance 2006 works on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, Solaris, OS/2, and Unix.
A fully functioning demo is available that allows for entering up to 100 transactions - so what are you waiting for? Go grab a copy and stop making excuses for ending up budget-less and broke every month.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
schmod said 9:36AM on 8-22-2006
Although even less full-featured than MoneyDance, I tend to perfer iBank due to its super-simple maclike (cocoa) interface.
MoneyDance is written in Java, which I think pretty much explains it all about the performance of the app.
Now, why Quicken is so good on the PC, and so terrible on the Mac simply eludes me. It's almost like they don't care.
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Randy Harris said 9:37AM on 8-22-2006
Does anybody know if Moneydance can directly import data from financial institutions like Quicken does? (I still use Quicken for Windows because it's so much better than Quicken for Mac)
http://www.MacSeven.com
Randy
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GrandWrath said 9:40AM on 8-22-2006
It's interesting theme. I want to consider it.
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rp said 10:07AM on 8-22-2006
How does this compare to Liquid Ledger? What are the performance issues (due to it being in Java)?
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SohoMac said 10:08AM on 8-22-2006
Randy,
Yes, Moneydance does download transactions just like Quicken for Windows.
It works great!
It's a java based app but it looks and runs pretty well and looks like a Mac app.
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Davide Rivola said 10:19AM on 8-22-2006
What about Budget? I'm using since last year and it helped me to change radically my spending habits (too much gadgets).
The envelope method is great!
Have a look:
http://www.snowmintcs.com/products/budgetmac/index.php
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Andrew White said 11:06AM on 8-22-2006
Buddi seems to have a lot of the same features and is FOSS. That said, I used Moneydance (trial), and liked it quite a bit.
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Rob said 11:07AM on 8-22-2006
I am a "switcher" and found Microsoft Money (surprisingly) to be one of the best Money Management programs for Windows. It did everything I wanted. Admittedly, finding a replacement for OS X has been a challenge. For a couple months I used Moneydance and iBank in parallel in an effort to decide on the one that would work best for me. iBank has a slick interface and is very Mac-like. It was nice in that it had iDisk capability for backups. Unfortunately, it did some weird things with the summing and provided erroneous balances on occasion and at one point my password protected file was no longer able to be opened. I would get an error and the file would not open. I posted a number of comments in their forum and was provided with quick replies and an attempt at support. But the options given to me were to send in my file for them to see if they could fix or start over from scratch. That was the final nail in the coffin for iBank. I've been using Moneydance for three months and it is a good (not great) program. It's not very pretty to look at and there are some awkward things about the interface (no keyboard shortcut for adding a new transaction) but for the most part it does the basics well and is fast on my 2.0 GHz MacBook.
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Tek said 11:19AM on 8-22-2006
This is a long shot, but is there anything out there that could possibly replace QuickBooks? This Moneydance 2006 seems to have a more personal spin to it than some of the Quicken software. I'm looking for payroll-capable software...
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Dave Barnes said 12:00PM on 8-22-2006
To Tek (#8),
"replace QuickBooks"?
The short answer as far as I can tell is: NO.
More is available at: http://www.quickbooksgroup.com/webx/forums/mac/ . YOU have to dig around, but you will find that the alternatives are no better or worse.
,dave
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nezromatron said 12:17PM on 8-22-2006
I'm still using MS Money through Parallels. Nothing else comes close to its features. I wish there was some real competition on the OS X front.
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Macintiger said 2:40PM on 8-22-2006
FYI, Quicken 2007 for Mac has been released. (http://quicken.intuit.com/mac.jhtml). I upgrade on every odd-numbered year, so I have already bought and installed it on my PPC MacMini.
Is this the update that finally makes it = to Quicken on Windows? Nope. However, it's not THAT bad and is still more full-featured than ibank or Money dance IMO. Also, it has not screwed up my financial data since like Quicken 2003, so I think they are working their way towards a decently useable product.
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daniel said 9:54AM on 8-23-2006
has anyone used GnuCash?
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