Moneydance - Cross-Platform Personal Finance

sreilly self-promotes: "Moneydance 2003 has just been released for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. This program is a completely cross-platform replacement for Quicken or MS Money. This is the first time that online banking and online bill payment has been available in a made-for-Linux application. It also has features that aren't available in Quicken such as an extension mechanism that lets developers easily add and distribute new features to the program."

Comments

Thanks but no thanks

[Drunken Coward]

I'm not going to trust my personal finances to a company that refuses to release their code under the GPL. Who knows what kind of data this software is gathering, not to mention the fact that I've never even heard of this company. If I don't use Microsoft Money because of these issues, why would I use something presented by an even less reputed source?

And forget auditing it myself, with an EULA that says:

You may not reverse engineer, decompile, translate, adapt, or disassemble the Software, nor shall you attempt to create the source code from the object code for the Software.

I'll wait until something free (as in beer and speech) before I think it's secure enough for my data, thanks.

Re:Thanks but no thanks

[JustAnotherReader]

I'm not going to trust my personal finances to a company that refuses to release their code under the GPL

Quicken and MS Money both send their data to the financial institution as XML is a format known as "Open Financial Exchange" or simply OFX

Since OFX is an open standard and the data is encrypted via SSL then all this product is doing is taking data you enter via a GUI and converting it to an OFX message. I say "only" but in fact that's quite a lot of work.

I've been involved in writing the receiving end of this software at a major Californian bank and it's kind of nice that most of our work is aimed at meeting the OFX specification. If your product can work with that spec then certifying it with Quicken and MS Money is not too difficult.

BTW, on a funny note, while Intuit has quite an extensive QA process that we must go through to get our software certified to work with Quicken, Microsoft's certification consist of "Do you work with Quicken? Great, you're certified"

OK, so I finally got through

[dacarr]

One thing that would be very nice to see is some sort of list of financial institutions that this has been checked with and that compatibility can be assured. At the very least, at least the software compatibilities for the financial institutions' back ends.

How robust is the database?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

I'm using one commercial product now which regularly gets its database corrupted even in brand-new files built from scratch. Sometimes it crashes when I try to back it up.

Never mind which product. I've heard the other one is worse anyway.

It's not just me. A Google(tm) search revealed that this has been a problem for years.

So -- what does Moneydance have on the back end? Can I trust it not to fail unrecoverably just before tax time? Are there repair facilities if something goes wrong? Do they work? Can I export to some simple text or XML format that I can inspect and patch if need be?

Re:Don't forget about Kapital

[Doc Hopper]

I have a great deal of experience with Quicken under Linux using Codeweavers Wine (the actual Crossover Office product, which I bought largely to run Quicken). It does just fine for the basic checkbook management thing, but there is one huge usability bug that's a show-stopper for me. If you try to enter a "split" (itemize a transaction), and any of the splits have a negative value (like transfer to another account via the split) Quicken crashes hard. Doesn't happen on Windows, but all the time on Linux under CXOffice.

In case you're interested in repeating the experiment, try setting up a house payment with all the correct accounts:
Asset: Escrow
Debt: Home Loan
Cash Flow: Checking

Set up payment from Checking to Home Loan for $900.00 (or whatever your house payment is). Then in House Payment, split that transfer into Principal (positive number), Interest (negative number), and Escrow (negative number). Click OK on Split window, BOOM! Down it goes. I use this technique all the time. Watching the Windows display, I think the Intuit folks actually do some goofiness with swapping the background window over to the account to which the negative transfer goes, and that may be the cause of the crash. In any case, happens every time on my two Linux machines.

The help is also broken, and I still rely on that a ton whenever I'm doing something new. You basically get blank screens on about half the help menu items. Some are populated, some aren't. It's very weird.

Other things that seem to be lacking in MoneyDance and GNUCash that I use all the time (I haven't tried either in about a year, though, so they may be updated):

* Most "planning" features, particularly setting up payment schedules automatically for debt reduction plans. My wife and I are on-track to get our house paid off in 9 years (only 5 years into the mortgage now), and it's largely due to this planning in Quicken.
* Automatic import into TurboTax. May not seem like a big deal, but when you run several businesses and hire an external tax preparation specialist, it's helpful if everything is in Quicken already that you can hand them a floppy disk with your TurboTax data for them to import into their whatever-program.
* Tax categories for just about everything under the sun, updated annually. I only use a handful of them, but when I know that a particular transaction is going to be a type of thing to end up on one of my forms at the end of the year, I can create a category for it and WOW! it appears on that form from TurboTax at the end of the year.
* Superb graphing & reporting. One-click graphs of where our money goes, easy reporting if we're on our debt reduction/savings plan targets, etc.

Admittedly, those features may be present in MoneyDance or GNUCash now. But they are definitely show-stoppers if I don't have them. And due to the bug in CXOffice, Quicken under Linux is really a non-starter at the moment, except when I need to glance at my finances. I regularly back up my data from my Windows machine, and import it into my GNU/Linux Quicken to I have the information available on my laptop in GNU/Linux all the time.

Really, the automated import stuff is a non-issue for me. I download a .qif just about daily from my credit union, import it, and match what's cleared. Takes about two minutes total (as long as I've kept up, if I'm a few days behind it takes a bit longer to check for matches), then I'm done for the day. End of the month, we review our numbers, see if we need to adjust the family budget to account for something, and get on with our lives. I wasted a HUGE amount of time learning the thing when we first bought it, though, in large part because I was trying to work around problems running it under Crossover Office on my GNU/Linux machines. I eventually mostly gave up, installed Windows XP on one of my home boxes, and just use that box for gaming & Quicken now.

Hope that answers the question! I'm eager to give MoneyDance anot

Tracking money is wrong.

[uberdave]

The problem I have with all of these money management softwares is that they have pathetic budgetting features, if they have them at all. Quicken, Gnucash, etc are great at tracking your money after you have spent it. However, the point of money management is not in tracking how it is spent, but in projecting and planning what *future* spending is going to be. I don't want to find out at the end of the month that I am short by $50. I want to find out at the beginning of the month that my projected spending is going to put me $50 in the hole. That way, I can cut back on something so that I don't wind up with too much month left at the end of my paycheck.

What I would like to see is limits on spending categories. For example: You decide that you are going to spend $100 on gas. Suddenly you have to go way out of town. When you enter the gas receipts and the total comes up to $120, there should be a warning dialog: "You have exceeded your allowable spending in this category." From there you would have to allocate funds from other spending categories (say dining out expenses) to cover the excess. The software should warn you that you need to cut back, and where you can cut back, (based on how you planned to spend the money originally) so that you don't spend more than you earn.

The bottom line is that you can't spend more than you have, and looking at where your money went will not help. You have to manage where your money is going to go.

Quicken's file format is open, write to it, dammit

[aquarian]

FYI, Quicken's .qif file format is wide open, a de facto standard that anyone can write to. I don't understand why more developers don't take advantage of this fact. If you're writing a new Quicken-replacement program you should just use it, rather than reinvent the wheel -- whether your product is commercial, GPL, or whatever. You can download the .qif spec from Intuit.

Intuit has more incentive to keep their file formats open becuase what keeps Quicken and especially Quickbooks going is the ability for developers to create add ons. Quickbooks has a whole industry of add-on developers. By using the .qif standard, you can plug into this community too. The more stuff your product will interface with, the more attractive it will be, be it commericial, GPL, or whatever.