I have not used this for on-line banking but for off-line use, compared to Quicken it is more stable, keeps more straightforward accounts (no special tax categories grafted onto a conventional system), and handles foreign currencies and GST/VAT. It is also less confusing to set up and use.

I have found some cosmetic bugs and I found one program-freezer connected with pop-up menus when choosing reports, but after pounding the Moneydance for 30 or 40 hours, nothing major seemed amiss.

Importing a complicated Quicken file proved to be easy, once I specified the correct date format, although I did need to delete a lot of empty accounts that Quicken created gratuitously and I needed to clean up a lot of accounts that Moneydance created to deal with inappropriately structured data in Quicken. After the file was imported, I noticed that Moneydance disagreed when calculating the cost basis of a particular mutual fund. When I did the calculations by hand I found that Moneydance was correct.

Quicken strikes me as more likely to make mistakes because it seems to maintain a lot more (breakable) structures in its data file. Moneydance seems to retain fewer structures and do more calculations on the fly. A 2.5MB Quicken file became 400KB in Moneydance. Also, Quicken needs to write data files within its own folder, even if that folder is in /Applications. This is not appropriate under OS X and Moneydance does not do so.

Moneydance does have one design failing that I found to be a nuisance. When entering the purchase or reinvestment of a mutual fund, you cannot enter the number of shares and the total amount, you need to enter the cost per share and the total amount: because of rounding off, Moneydance is likely to report a different number of shares than the fund house. The workaround is to enter, as the price per share, the arithmetic term <total cost/number of shares> and let the program calculate the number.

If you understand double-entry bookkeeping, Moneydance is simple and straightforward. This is fortunate because the program's documentation is just help file that does little except tell you what is in front of your eyes. The is the weakest part of the package. Fortunately, the developer maintains an e-mail list whose members are helpful.