Intuit’s “on-again, off-again commitment to the Mac means the best Quicken was released back in 2007,” Bambi Brannan writes for Mac 360. “If you’re ready to dump Quicken and look for greener pastures for your money, you won’t have to go far.”
“We’ve long advocated MoneyWell as the Mac money app for the rest of us, and for good reason. While Quicken languished without updates all those years, MoneyWell was the financial turtle app, plodding along, always improving,” Brannan writes. “MoneyWell for iPhone will sync with MoneyWell on your Mac using Dropbox. The advantage here is that pretty much everywhere the check book or credit card goes, the iPhone goes, so you don’t have to worry about keeping track of the transaction details until you get back to your Mac.”
Brannan writes, “MoneyWell isn’t an app for managing a stock portfolio or mutual funds, or doing balance sheets or P & L’s. It’s the app for the rest of us, especially those left behind by Quicken’s multi-year denial of Mac users.”
Read more in the full article here.
The irony here is that Bill Campbell and Jobs were close friends.
Is Moneywell really overall the best Mac financial app? I have been putting off for years buying one since none of them seemed particularly good. Anybody?
I use an app (For Mac and iDevices) called iCompta and have been very pleased so far. Very reasonable prices too.
It’s pretty nice. The QIF/etc import is really slick. All I do is download the file from my bank and double-click on it. MoneyWell imports it. There are great income / spending graphs. They have buckets where different types of spending go. You can easily see where you’re money is going; I think that’s the best feature.
Disclaimer: I used Quicken ’98 for years and years; I’ve never touched a newer version.
No
No, it’s not the best? No, it’s not good? No you don’t want to reply in a useful manner?
Got it.
Yes.
As much as I see that some people hate Quicken, I don’t have any major issues with it other than having to go to Essentials for Lion compatibility. It is nice to see good alternatives. Perhaps this is the kick in the pants Intuit needs. I’d like to see the ability to enter a transaction on my iPhone or iPad and have it update the register on my MBP at home so I can dispose of the receipt instead of having it stuffed in my jeans until I get home.
‘ I’d like to see the ability to enter a transaction on my iPhone or iPad and have it update the register on my MBP at home so I can dispose of the receipt instead of having it stuffed in my jeans until I get home.’
iBank does just that.
http://download.cnet.com/iBank/3000-2057_4-10295723.html
I have been using ‘iBank’ for a year and it does the job for me.
http://download.cnet.com/iBank/3000-2057_4-10295723.html
Quicken – stick-em!
Been a happy iBank user since 2006. I see no reason to change.
——RM
just switched from Quicken to ibank because of Lion and the missing features of Quicken Essentials. A little different interface, but I am totally happy with the switch.
I want something to replace Quickbooks for my business. Moneywell is a fine product, but can’t lift enough to do that.
Account Edge
http://accountedge.com/
AccountEdge is a great program if you do not have an accountant or outside company interface with your books. Quickbooks has the “Accountant’s Copy” capability that allows us to send our books to our accountant up through a specified date and continue to work in Quickbooks until our accountant is finished their review and updates. Then we upload their file and everything is done. I wish Accountedge had this feature and could import/export Quickbooks files. To me, it is like having a spreadsheet program that is not compatible with Excel.
FYI…I hate Intuit..I would buy an alternative in a second if it worked for me.
Do any of the financial apps allow a receipt to be scanned & attached?
There’s an app called Mint for your iPhone that allows you to keep receipts as a picture file in the camera roll. It’s very basic in functionality but it does the job as an expense manager.
Mint is actually quite a powerful tool, when coupled with its web site. It is owned by Intuit and if you aren’t uncomfortable giving them your bank account passwords, it will give you a fairly complete money management tool. You get to track your entire cash flow, complete with a pretty rich set of features for quickly building charts, graphs and reports (spending, income, net worth, assets, all by category, my merchant, over time, etc), plus financial planning and setting up goals, etc. It becomes more valuable the longer you use it, as you get better picture of money flow and trends. The site is free and offers advertising based on your cash flow (offering financial products, such as bank accounts with cashback on groceries, if you spend above average on groceries, etc). If you aren’t too paranoid about access to your login info, the service is actually extremely valuable.
Any financial app I use needs to be able to import data from my bank, and do minor stock/portfolio management as well, so I can get an overall picture.
Moneydance is also a great Quicken replacement.
I moved to money dance. I tried iBank free 30 day and encountered immediate problems with downloading brokerage transactions after loading up with Quicken 2006 as imported starting point. Their support for this issue was nonexistent. I thought the iBank approach to manual entry of transactions was too far off from the way Quicken (and finance types) actually process transactions.
Money Dance is pretty good, easy to import and balance accounts. It is quirky in how it handles imported transactions from brokerages, such as interest and dividends, purchase and sale of securities. Not exactly logical inhow it works, but seems to do the job, and does a much better job of utilizing the Mac’s interface.
I’m curious what importing issues you had. I found ibank would import all the same transactions from my bank and credit cards that Quicken did.
I have been using Moneydance since 2005. It imports Quicken files better than Quicken does.
No MoneyWell for iPad, no MoneyWell for me.
I moved from Quicken 2007 to Essentials. I had dumped the junk called Essentials. I found myself using it less and less and every month keeping up was like frustrating work. I found iBank. It does everything Quicken 2007 use to do and in some instances is much better. The iPhone app syncs witht he Mac app and they have announced an iPad app that will also sync with the Mac app and the iPhone app.
iBank for me since early last year. The rest, which I have tried out, are ‘meh’.
IGG, iBanks creator, will release an iPad version this year, which will serve as a basic framework for the desktop version. Good things ahead.
I tried iBank awhile back but it did not support forecasting down to a daily resolution so I went with Money Dance which, with extensions, does this very well. Does iBank now support this functionality?
Wife moved us to MoneyDance for the new calendar year after doing a bake-off with iBank. Said she liked the MoneyDance interface better. No way I’m paying for Quicken for Lion when it’s the same warmed over product from five years ago. Give your money to one of these companies that’s earning it.
Intuit (maker of Quicken) also bought and operates Mint.com which is an awesome Web based financial management tool, with iPhone and iPad apps, that is free.
Selective reporting MDN? Looking for some referrer revenues?
Snowmint’s Budget has served me well for a couple years now. They have a mobile version, too (haven’t used that).
I find that if you marry an accountant, you don’t have to worry about all this bullshit.
BEST COMMENT I’ve read in a LONG TIME!! Amen, you got that right!! 🙂
I use Budget by Snowmint. Have tried all the others. Moneywell doesn’t allow you to allocate money manually, which I prefer to do. It lets you create a budget framework and then decides how to allocate from there. Also, my wife and I get paid on such crazy schedules that the scheduler doesn’t work for us.
I prefer the Envelope method, i want to know where my money is going, so iBank, Quicken, MoneyDance and the rest just don’t work for me. iBank has envelopes now, but they are rudimentary compared to Moneywell and Budget.
I am currently evaluating YNAB, and it shows promise. I will take a look at the new version of Moneywell, but i am not going to hold my breath. It can really screw you up if you are not careful.
A month before the release of Lion (and therefore Quicken’s inability to work on my Macs), I sampled most of the Mac-specific banking/financial apps. I chose iBank and have been very pleased. Like many of the others I sampled, iBank has a Mac-pleasing GUI, so unlike Quicken’s nauseating look and feel.
Say, what’re the odds that Microsoft is slipping Intuit some jingle in exchange for their Mac-product borkage?
Just moved over to AccountEdge for my book keeping. Nice program and simple for invoicing and paying bills. Quicken will rue the day they abandoned the Mac and treated it’s users as 2nd rate. Just like Adobe, others will come along with simple user interface and Quicken with it’s bloated software will be to slow to act. For now Quicken is the de facto but the sand of change is increasing exponentially.
I’d recommend holding off on MoneyWell. We’ve been using it for over two years now and it marginally user friendly and has had some serious syncing issues. The idea and design is wonderful but if you can’t sync in order to keep your data up to date then you have no idea what you have available to spend in a given budget. I’ve emailed MoneyWell and all I get is “we’re aware of the problem and working on it”. With $60 for the Mac and $10 for the iPhone they aren’t working quickly enough in my book. Been several months since the problem started for us… longer for some.
Well, I’m use MoneyWell since 2007. Despite the fact that last release interface overcomplicated sometimes, and my system slowdown sometime (very very rare), I think it worth the money. I use MoneyWell with Numeric Notes, one for finance tracking, other for finance calculations. And I completely satisfied with them.
I still believe new releases will provide more clear interface. If you have some doubts about it, I highly recommend you to try it.
I have purchased a new mac mini and haven’t started it up yet or purchased software to transfer my quicken data too. I have a quicken user for many years and enjoy manually entering checkbook entries and double entries for debits. What is out there for me?