Moneydance - 2008

Reviewer background: I have used Quicken for 19 years on a complex mix of accounts including stock and fund portfolios, loans, and mortgages.

Moneydance has two major plusses: 1. It can communicate with many banks, brokerages, and credit card companies and 2. It isn't Quicken. These factors are why I am evaluating Moneydance. Quicken has shortchanged Macintosh users for years, and the situation worsened in recent years despite having the CEO of Intuit on Apple's Board of Directors. So, here is my assessment of Moneydance after numerous hours of use.

Data Import: Moneydance did very well with simple accounts. However, on more complex accounts there were many different types of failures. On one brokerage account, Moneydance failed to import over two years of data. On other brokerage accounts, the first few entries were missing. The most annoying errors involved transfers between accounts. For example, my pay is direct deposited into my checking account, but only after some of my pay goes into a retirement account. This pay deposit would be handled in Quicken by assigning multiple categories (salary, FICA, Medicare, retirement, etc.) with the retirement category being a transfer. Moneydance captured each direct deposit but added an additional separate entry for the transfer resulting in a double deduction. This separate entry was unreconciled (easy to find because of the missing check mark), but could not be deleted! There is no good way to fix this problem. Putting a zero dollar amount in the extra transaction also put a zero dollar amount in the linked retirement account. Zeroing the retirement transfer in the original entry requires another entry to correct the balance. This appears to be the best solution, but it is very time consuming.

(An aside on data import: Not long ago, due to a Quicken problem, I had to export all accounts, create a new account, and import everything back. It worked perfectly. Therefore, I am confident that the problems I had with Moneydance import were due to Moneydance and not to a corrupt data file.)

Documentation: I am one of those unusual persons who actually reads manuals. That is especially true for important and complex programs like ones used to manage all of my money and assets. Moneydance has no printed manual or PDF manual. It has a mediocre HTML-based guide on its web site. The first page contains links to a few dozen topics. Most of the topic pages are text only. A few topic pages contain screen captures. The main support for Moneydance is within its user forum. That may be acceptable for free, open source software or for inexpensive shareware, but it is unacceptable for a commercial product.

Interface/Ease-of-Use: Even after filtering my accounts, I find Moneydance's home window too busy. The Investment Accounts is the worst with its display of balances and individual share totals on the right side. I dislike not being able to remove, reposition, or truncate some of the window items. I would prefer a single screen of selected data, not a scrolling window containing data I don't need to see.

Another quirk is the Edit menu's lack of context sensitivity. For example, when working in a bank account, if I select an entire transaction and choose cut or copy, nothing happens. Unusable menu items should be grayed-out and unselectable. I also find it strange that the Edit menu does not contain delete, but that both delete and forward delete keys can be used to delete an entry. Some account actions, such as print register or print check can only be triggered from the pop-up menus at the top of the window. There are no print commands in the File menu. These interface quirks are typical of applications written by non-Macintosh oriented programmers.

Entering transactions is straightforward. Date fields have pop-up calendars. Transaction type, description, category, and tag fields have pop-up menus with choices from all previous entries. Right-clicking anywhere on a selected transaction displays a contextual menu with useful choices (most of which are not available any other way, another violation of Apple interface recommendations). Setting up securities is straightforward but bothersome. Moneydance offers no assistance at finding the ID, official name, ticker symbol, etc. You will need to find a web site that offers this information.

I did not assess the reminders feature.

Graphs and Reports: Moneydance offers a good selection of graphs and reports. The graphs are resizable, and the fonts and font sizes can be changed. However, little else is customizable. You cannot change axis scales, number or date formats, line or point colors, point shape, etc. The graphs cannot be exported in any format. Graphs can be saved in an undisclosed format (no .abc extensions is added). Investigation showed that the file actually is a PNG file, so you cannot edit individual components of the saved graph. Reports are even more restrictive: you cannot adjust anything except window size and column widths. Reports can be exported by clicking the Save button, a completely non-intuitive approach. Also, you have to fill in a file path name field before clicking OK, otherwise you get a gibberish-containing error message: "Error saving report: java.io.FileNotFoundException: (No such file or directory)." This looks like a holdover from Windows version 2. The Moneydance programmers again used their own interface instead of tapping into Apple's interface elements.

Moneydance allows export of the entire root account but not individual accounts. All you can choose is the date range for export. This is a major nuisance if you need to share account data with another application.

Summary: Moneydance, despite being around for ten years, has many rough edges. Poor data import makes it difficult to switch to Moneydance from Quicken or other competitors. The non-Macintosh interface adds to the learning curve, as does the lack of a good manual. For me, the only advantage of Moneydance is that it connects to almost every financial institution I use (whereas Quicken connects to none). At this time, the disadvantages of Moneydance outweigh that advantage.

Did anything change between this release and the one of 03/24/08?

Reason I ask is because it will no longer launch for me consistently. I have to relaunch 2-3 times before it will work without quitting and reporting a problem.

????

I'm going to try to go back to the previous version which worked flawlessly.