Slashdot Mirror
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."
And forget auditing it myself, with an EULA that says:
I'll wait until something free (as in beer and speech) before I think it's secure enough for my data, thanks.
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
I direct your attention to GnuCash.
I've never used it, but it certainly seems like a worthy contender.
Does your average linux user actually have any finances to manage?
-1: Troll
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Slashdotted with 2 comments. Look, if you are promoting your own project, there is no excuse for a slashdotting. Be prepared next time you submit your PR piece.
So, since the homepage refused my connection:
Can I install the client on multiple machines without an additional license? Does it work with Bank of America seemlessly (ie, I don't have to futz about with dl'ing the transactions manually). Can I import Quicken 2003 data? How much does it cost? What libraries did you use for the cross platform work?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Now I only need money.
Until there is a personal finance program that allows me to calculate my savings in large stone wheels, I just don't have a use for it.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
I am more fond of women who dance for money than money that dances. But, mabey that's just me.
For those of us who dislike Intuit's DRM, this sounds like a great alternative to one of their products. The fact that it runs on GNU/Linux is a nice bonus, too.
I hope they follow up with some nice tax software, so they can really hit Intuit where it counts.
I've tried it before. People just looked at me funny and I didn't get any money. Same thing with the rain dance. Must be doing something wrong...
Thoughts?
Just the opposite. Security through good open code, that can be reviewed by people who understand this and confirm that there is real security is much more secure that "I've written good code, trust me" type code. The bad guys who want your data, you bank accounts and your identity are not going to be stopped from reverse engineering the code by an EULA. If an EULA only stops honest people from checking the validity of the code, then one has to ask "why have it?".
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
How about Mozilla? I've been doing all of my banking, and paying my credit card bills, over HTTP/SSL for ~2 years now. Which is exceptionally nice as my bank is a local credit union about 3000 miles away from my current place of residence.
If online banking with Linux is causing people problems, I would highly recommend finding a bank that supports doing this kind of thing over the web.
...but only on OS X. We bought it because of it's cross-platform capabilities, but never ended up taking advantage of them.
The features are pretty good, in that I don't often want to scream at it and torch the hardware it's running on, like I do most software I use. My wife does most of the finances (whew!), and she seems to like it. I can't compare it to Quicken or whatever, because I haven't used them, but we always import our Quicken-formatted bank statements into MoneyDance with no problems.
Sorry I can't provide a more helpful review, but I just wanted to drop a "Hey, I'm using it, and it's at least decent" note, since no one else appears to have actually used it.
I thought I'd weigh in on this discussion since a lot of folks seem to be unfamiliar with the history of this application. MoneyDance dates to a time before when the only other options for Linux were a package written in TCL, and XAccount/GNUCash. At the time $20 bought a license for the application. Having wanted a finance application that worked well, I happily registered my copy and used it for years. The AppGen decided they needed a personal finance component and purchased MoneyDance from the author Sean Reilly. AppGen then had trouble after the dot com boom/bust, and MoneyDance was the first to suffer. People found out the hard way that they had purchased an unsupported product. For the longest time AppGen just sat on the code, letting it rot in secret while people wondered out loud when new fixes and changes would be released. I have since moved to GnuCash for my finances, but I applaud Sean for getting the code and releasing new versions of MoneyDance again. It really is a wonderful program to use, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it for anyone who would like another option in personal finance management.
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.
This sig no verb.
The world's most intuitive personal finance software just got better! Moneydance 2003, the groundbreaking new financial tool is now available for all platforms. Moneydance can be trusted to keep all of your financial information safe, organized, and at your fingertips. After just a few minutes with Moneydance's simple interface and powerful features, you will wonder how you ever got along without it.
Protect your privacy - and your peace of mind With Moneydance, you will not be bombarded with advertisements on your desktop, nor have your personal information shared without your explicit consent. Unlike some other applications, Moneydance does not install third party software on your computer to monitor or restrict your activities.
Online banking and bill payment: no paper? no problem Pay your bills in seconds without writing a single check. With Moneydance you can automatically synchronize your records with transactions downloaded from your bank. Moneydance currently can perform online banking and bill payment with hundrededs of financial institutions. Moneydance also integrates nicely with the Paytrust online bill payment service.
Manage your budget Moneydance lets you easily create and manage multiple budgets and shows you where your accounts over or under budget. Simply specify how much you expect to earn or spend in each category for a given time interval (weekly, monthly, yearly). Moneydance can then show you a comparison of how your budget compares to your actual income and expenses for any time period.
Stay on schedule The ability to schedule recurring or future transactions in Moneydance makes it easy to plan for bills, loan payments, and paychecks. On the starting screen Moneydance shows all of your upcoming or overdue reminders, and you can view future and past reminders for any month. Special loan payment reminders automatically calculate principal and interest payments for mortgages and other loans. You can even print a monthly calendar that includes your scheduled items.
Visualize your wealth Another great reason to use Moneydance is that it lets you easily visualize your finances. With Moneydance's built-in graphs you can view your accounts from many angles. The Net Worth graph allows you to view the total value of all of your accounts over time. The Expenses graph provides a clear picture of where your money is going and when. Other graphs include Account Balance, Currency History, Income vs Expenses, and more. Moneydance can also remember commonly used graphs so that they are accessible with a single click from the main screen.
Get the details, quickly Moneydance provides a variety of reports detailing information about your accounts. Built-in reports include: Budget, Missing Checks, Net Worth, Account Balances, Cash Flow, Detailed Cash Flow, Transactions, Cost Basis, and VAT/GST. You can also tell Moneydance to remember commonly used reports so that they are accessible with a single click from the main screen.
International ease If you ever cross national borders you will appreciate Moneydance's built-in support for multiple currencies. Recording international transfers is a breeze - simply specify the amount and the currency, and Moneydance will automatically calculate the value in the context of the current account. You can download Up-to-date exchange rates from the Internet automatically with the OandA.com exchange rate updater extension.
Compatible, standards-based reliability Moneydance uses industry standard technologies such as OFX, QIF, SSL/TLS, Java, and XML to ensure compatibility with other software and services. In addition, with our open API and Extension Developer Kit you can be sure that third parties will always be able to integrate their services with Moneydance.
Understand your portfolio Today's investment portfolios are as complicated as ever. Moneydance can bring your investements into focus with support for tracking stocks, bonds, CDs, mutual funds, and more. The investment account overview sho
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?
" Depending on who you sign up with, fees range from free to $10 a month. Use a service that stands behind its electronic payment, such as paying late fees and handling problems with vendors if you made the payment several days before the due date. When you figure the cost of the check, stamp and envelope for every transaction, a small monthly fee is worth it. "
I, on the other hand, don't trust anyone. I have to put my signature on everything - even if it takes more time out of my life! It's the same when you use a debit card. If you want to dispute the charges, for whatever reason, the cash is gone from your account until the dispute is resolved - if ever. This is unlike a credit card where the credit card company takes the risk. With online bill paying or debit cards, you take all the risk. So, if someone rips you off, well, you eat it!!
In short you're risking, although unlikely,an event of having a very bad situation of having too much cash taken out of your account, or having a bogus charge against your account and having limited recourse to get the money back.There is no spoon or sig.
That's a shame. It can take a little while to get used to double-entry bookkeeping, but once you grok it, GnuCash really makes things sing. I've used GnuCash since 1.4.x, and it's still the best thing I've tried (including Quicken). You can get away with just using the checkbook type register to do simple finances. Really, the beauty of GnuCash is that it allows itself to be as simple or as complicated as you need it. I started using it for simple finances, and now I also run my consulting business on it. It's been great for both.
You can download transactions to it, too, in reply to one of the parent posts. Bill paying isn't in yet, but things seem to be moving along pretty well in that direction. Plus, the users mailing list is really active and helpful, so there's no need to bang heads.
If there's a walk-through or tutorial guide on setting up gnucash for [preferrably simple-style] personal finances, please post. I've looked for something several times and haven't found any useful references. The recent 1.8 looks fairly close to my needs, but I simply don't have brainpower to invest in figuring out a workable setup on my own. (Yes, the irony of that statement vs. my running two dual boot linux boxes isn't lost on me...where you think my time goes? ;-) Something like a "MS Money user's survival guide to gnucash" (or the like for quicken users) would probably go a long way to help gain some adoption.
And, having my /. habits honed to a fine edge, jumped right in without reading the post either, expecting to find something about Steve Ballmer. Oh well.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
.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.
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
Hope that answers the question! I'm eager to give MoneyDance anot
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
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.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
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.
.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.
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
http://www.gnucash.org/docs/C/gnucash-guide/
The link posted by the AC is very good. There's also a PDF which is a pretty concise walk through the basic features (pre-1.8, but still very useful).
Also, when you start GnuCash for the first time, there's a "Druid" that will walk you through and help you get your accounts downloaded and set up.
Clearly you don't know the problems surrounding the qif format very well.
-I can't be used as the main save format of an app, because of the lack of a transaction ID field. Quicken sure as hell doesn't use it as it's file format, only an import-export format.
-There is no definitive spec on the file format available from intuit. All the docs available are listed here http://libofx.sourceforge.net/links.html and the most complete certainly isn't intuit's. Even the account type identifiers sometimes change depending on the language of your Quicken (examples for example, !Type:Bank becomes |Type:Banque in french Quicken 2000)
I cannot tell you the number of times I have balanced my checkbook and came across double-entries on the bank statement, from the same place, nearly at the same time - like they ran the card through twice! If I was looking at this online, I may not see this discrepancy (unless I looked really close).
I currently use the Checkfree software for all of this, but they recently moved to Quicken, so if the damn Moneydance website ever comes up - I want to see how it compares - in the meantime, I will probably end up installing Quicken.
I have thought that maybe I should go back to doing all of this "by hand" - but I love to pay my bills via electronic means. Most solutions for Linux (like GNUcash), since they don't offer EBT transactions (yet), mean you have to do double entry (once for the online payment, like through the bank, and once in the money program). Double entry can and will trip you up, though - which can be a bad thing at the end of the month (nothing like finding out you have a negative balance because you double entered, or entered incorrectly, your paycheck amount).
I have been trying to come up with a different method to allow me to do online paying without double entry - I was thinking something like a backwards method, where you keep your receipts, then when you "balance", you go through the online statement and compare the receipts to the statement, those that match do one thing, those that don't (or seem like theres a double) do another - but this seems like a large kludge that probably would have problems as well.
All I want is a simple program that replicates the account activity page on my checkbook, allows bill paying from it, and has a few simple reports - nothing fancy. Checkfree's original software, while only allowing comms via a modem, was just that simple program - perfect for what I needed. Now it is going away (like I knew it would eventually). I can only hope the special version of Quicken they sent out is simple as well - I guess I will find out this weekend.
Oh, by the way - one other thing you find out when you balance your account are the number of transactions that *don't* get reported to your account. Many times, you might buy something, and due to one reason or another, the transaction never gets sent to your account - so, free stuff (or at least until they figure it out, which I have yet to encounter)! One of my friends got a free computer system this way (ok, that is on the extreme end - most of the time for me it has been small gas and food purchases)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon