The Muse

I posted yesterday on my new finance tracking software, Moneydance. This is a follow-up post.

After transferring my accounts from Quicken to Moneydance, I spent a good bit of time making sure everything transferred correctly. Minus a few snags in my investment accounts, everything went smoothly.

Initial impressions:

• I find the home/root screen to be the most useful portion of the program, aside from my next point. Quicken was able to give me an accounts window, but it just didn’t provide the information in a meaningful way. Now I have one screen with my accounts grouped by type, a transaction calendar, investment watch, quick budget analysis, and reminders.
• Extensions make Moneydance the Firefox of finance software. Other users develop extensions to make the program better for them, which helps us all out. My favorite is the Credit Card Paydown Calculators. It calculates the payoff time for all active credit cards, given any sort of variable you want to throw at it.
• The interface has an OS X feel that Quicken could never muster. Moneydance is written for OS X, Linux, and Windows, and seems to have a native GUI for each platform.

This is $40 well-spent.

        

fowlerjk life finance, money, software

After using Quicken for several years, I’ve come to the point where it’s no longer much use to me anymore. We have so many different accounts in our household (multiple savings, checking, investment, etc), and Quicken just doesn’t lay it all out in a way that is helpful. The last Mac version seems very half-hearted, and with Quicken, there’s no such thing as an upgrade. One has to buy the full version every time.

I’ve been looking for Quicken alternatives for a few days. I’ve tried a few and settled on Moneydance. As I get more familiar with the program, I’ll post my observations. So far, I’m impressed with its interface. I want to be able to see my financial health at one glance, then drill down for more specifics. This is exactly how Moneydance is set up.

        

fowlerjk life finance, money, software