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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."
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.
So you don't use banks or credit cards then? Because I don't know of a bank or credit card company that has opened up their software.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
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.
It was funny. I was on bugtraq, and someone posted some code, showing how a system (freebsd at the time), could be exploited. Iditoically enough, I trusted the source after giving it a quick look and ran it. Somehow, I missed something.. a call to drop to the shell and execute a ping -f.
So tell me. Do you go through the pains of examining the source of every application you use?
But would you say, someone would eventually catch it in code? Sure, it'd a good argument. After all, web servers, name servers, XFree86... they have bugs, people catch them.
So here's my next question. There's one fundamental difference. If everyone ran a tampered copy of other free softwares, the damage would be minimal compared to say, transmitting your financial information to a server in Java (the island, not the language). After all, after I realized what that bugtraq code did, I killed the app. No permanent reprecussions.
Do you trust MS to not transmit your financial information when you do a software update? Do you use a machine with no net connection to prevent your financial info from spreading around? ANd if it did spread out once using GPL softare, who's fault is it?
Opensource isn't a panacea. It's a methodology. It's a way of making software secure over time, if people can contribute. It's about anyone going in and making improvements to their copy, or hell.. breaking it. It's not about instantaneous security. After all, did you audit your last linux install to maek sure it doesn't transmit your shadow file off to Alan Cox, since he's become a nut and hates all linux users now? (Not really.. but you get the idea).
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
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...
I'm currently looking into using GNUcash and so far its pretty impressive. I used to work for a company maintaining data in Quickbooks and eventually in MS Money. GNUCash is very capable against both of these programs for your average home user. Their webpage does list the goal of adding business features in the future.
:)
What I think GNUCash is missing most of all, however, is cross platform compatblity. I know it handles QIF files but the program itself has not been ported to Windows or MacOS yet. Many people these days have multiple OSes and I don't want have to reboot my machine in order to balance my checkbook (this arguement applies to both MS Money and Quicken as well).
GNUCash has alot of potential and I might just start using it with the hope that cross-compatablity comes later.
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.
It has been ported to OSX, and is distributed as part of fink, IIRC.
s h
Yup; recent, but there: http://fink.sourceforge.net/pdb/package.php/gnuca
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.
Translation: I don't want to pay anyone for their hard work in putting together any piece of cross platform software.
Seriously, software and politices are NOT the same thing. People need to grow up a little. I could maybe see the arguement of wanting to see the source, but free as in beer and speech just shows what you are really after; a free ride.
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.
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.
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
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