Personal Finance Software for the Mac

The key hassle that hit when the Wheaten moved back to the Mac a year ago where Windows continues to hold a meaningful advantage is Personal Finance software. A keen devotee to managing his money both daily spending and investments the Wheaten is a firm believer in the power of using a PC to help track and manage his spending. The goal in shifting back to the Mac was to get away from many of the hassles involved in owning and operating a Windows based PC (e.g., viruses, firewall, klunky software that doesn't behave properly - the list goes on). In general the transition back to the Mac has been relatively painless with music, pictures, and other documents all migrating seamlessly. The one area that seamingly lags far behind the Windows world is the area of personal finance software.

Thus the Wheaten started an on-going quest for a solution to his financial software woes - for the most part Mac efficiandos have tended to really only push vendors for very basic financial management software with Quicken dominating the landscape. Unfortunately Intuit, normally a forward thinking company that has done a great job over the years in helping develop this category and create user friendly personal finance software is the dominant player in this market. While Quicken for Mac comes bundled with most new Macs the Wheaten's advice is that if you live outside the U.S. you might as well remove this app since they're no longer supporting country specific versions (at least in Canada). In addition if you're a Quicken user on the PC the disparity in features between the two versions is wide and noticeable leading you to hair pulling frustration. Thus started what should have been a simple journey the options for personal finance software on the Mac come down to the following:

MoneyDance = a multiplatform product that offers Linux, PC, and Mac versions of the software. This is the product the Wheaten ultimately migrated to and offers a fairly robust set of features covering budgeting, bill management, investments, reporting. In using MoneyDance over the past 18 months and evaluating a number of alternatives this product still manages to hit most of the Wheaten's requirements but does come up short in terms of the sophistication of the Investment management functionality (that said relative to the PC none of the Mac products really seams to have gotten investments as a category). Overall, the open source nature of MoneyDance's product means that there is a fairly lively community on Yahoo Groups! and hosted on MoneyDance's own forums for support. The product team at MoneyDance seems committed to improving the product and has significantly improved the reporting engine in the most recent release. Downloads from a large list of financial institutions are supported and for those that aren't the ability to import files in .OFX (a widely supported file format used by most financial institutions) is available.
http://www.moneydance.com

Other apps that were explored and dismissed as being caught somewhere in the middle of being basic but frustrating to use were: LiquidLedger; iBank; and Moneywell.

Cha-Ching = an interesting product that offers a basic metaphor for managing your money could be a great alternative for the novice user that is looking for basic expense tracking and budgetting. Having not spent a lot of time with the demo the Wheaten has not tested the functionality relating to the ease of downloads from your financial institution. An inexpensive product at $40 that is ideal for those looking to cleanup their desks and better manage the flow of day to day household expenses.
http://www.midnightapps.com/


Other options - at the end of the day you could leave your personal finances on a Windows based machine and manage this via use of virtualization software such as Parrallels or VMWare for the Mac. However, in the Wheaten's view this negates many of the benefits of migrating to the Mac and in his case the need really only to run one operating system on his Macbook. For now the Wheaten is sticking with MoneyDance the most advanced of the Financial Software apps for the Mac. However he remains frustrated at the fairly rudimentary
nature of the investment functions in most Mac software.

What are you using to manage your personal finances on the Mac?