(re)start tracking my finances

I’ve been doing this for the past three months, mainly using iBank. It does’t do everything I want — I miss being able to easily track and chart my spending and my net worth, the way I could with MS Money, but it’s become too much of a hassle to fire up the old laptop to use Money just for a few charts, so I’m sticking with just iBank. I suppose that I can consider this done, even though software limitations prevent me from doing things quite the way I’d like to. 5 years ago

I tried a couple of programmes for Mac OSX, namely Moneydance and iBank, both of which had trial versions that I could download for free. What I wanted was a programme that would let me track my spending, track my investments, set a budget and compare my spending to that budget, and track my net worth. They both got the job done, and each one had it’s pros and cons.

Moneydance
The big plus for this was the start-up/home screen. It gave me a clear summary of my various account balances, portfolio value (falling every month, sadly) and upcoming or overdue transactions. I liked that.

What I didn’t like was the user interface. It wasn’t very attractive, and although it was usable and pretty easy to follow, it wasn’t as functional as it could have been. Nothing major, but lots of little quirks that began to get on my nerves after a while.

iBank
It’s not as intuitive to use as Moneydance or MS Money. It took me ages to figure out how to set up an investment account and then it took me ages to figure out how to update the stock prices and then it took me more ages to figure out how to record a share purchase transaction. A bit tiresome. Also the transaction entry process is more-error prone that Moneydance is; sometimes I click in the wrong place and end up entering an empty transaction or a transaction on the wrong date or something like that — this happened far more often in iBank than it did with MS Money or with Moneydance. I think it has to do with the fact that there’s no particular way to conclude transaction entry, no finish/enter button.

I did like the interface, it’s more OSX-y than Moneydance is. I like that everything happens in one window (Moneydance had a few too many pop-up windows for my liking). I like that it gives me a little pie-chart on the start-up screen so you can see where my money’s going. I like that on the start-up screen it gives me a summary of my net worth (and presents both reconciled and unreconciled balances).

After about a month and a half, I’ve decided to continue using iBank, rather than Moneydance. It has its issues, and really it’s not as user-friendly as Moneydance is, but it just feels better to me. I wouldn’t say that, for my purposes, either one really excels over the other — I just like iBank more.

Despite that, the most telling thing I can say about either programme is that, after trying both of them, I hauled out the old Windows laptop and fired it up, because although both iBank and Moneydance are serviceable, neither of them quite measures up to MS Money. In particular, their reporting functions don’t seem as automatic and easy to use, and I miss being able to track my financial history via a dazzling array of pie charts and bar graphs and balance sheets. So right now I’m using iBank and MS Money in tandem. Which is a bit redundant, but I’m hoping that it’s just a transitional thing and that I’ll be able to wean myself off MS Money entirely before too long.

P.S. Forgot to mention that Moneydance is also cheaper than iBank: US$29.99 to buy, as compared to US$39.99 for iBank. 5 years ago

I used to keep track of my money almost religiously, but last year I let that lapse. I’m trying to get that sorted again, so I’m trying out a few personal finance programmes for Macs (on my old Windows computer I used Microsoft Money and I miss it dearly; good personal finance software is one of the areas where Microsoft beats Apple hands down) to see which one works best for me, so that I can begin to manage my money properly again. 6 years ago