The Secret to a Successful Budget eBook, 101 Ways to Save Money booklet, and exclusive coupon codes to save 20% off ($10.00) Moneydance personal finance software and 10% off You Need A Budget Software ($6.00).
Earlier in 2010, I embarked on a journey to find the best personal finance software. That journey led me to a product that some months ago I had never heard of – Moneydance.
Moneydance Review: Why I selected Moneydance out of the sea of personal finance software:
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In my research on products, I tend to focus on the feedback and reviews of actual users. Those who used Moneydance had very good things to say about the product.
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The software has two features that are very important to me – it is a desktop program, and it allows you to budget in multiple currencies.
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It offers a free download and the ability to use the product for up to 100 transactions before you buy it. Why not try out a product when you can do it for free?
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After my research and trial, I purchased a personal copy of Moneydance. I should note that my money was subsequently refunded and I was offered a free product when they found out I was a personal finance blogger. This, however, is not a paid post and the opinions are 100% mine.
Buy The Secret to a Successful Budget and get an exclusive 20% off Moneydance coupon. Click here for more details.
Review Moneydance Software Features:
Here is a screenshot of the homepage
This product is supported by Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems.
Online banking and bill payment
This personal finance software can synchronize your records with transactions downloaded from your bank (using OFX, QFX, or QIF files). This makes reconciling your bank statements and paying your bills a breeze. Unlike other products, the bill pay feature is offered free of charge.
How to make a budget in Moneydance: Easy budget management
Setting up a budget is easy. My wife and I have always used Excel for our budgeting, but my wife really likes the way this product is organized and how clean everything looks. This personal finance software tracks your spending in real time so you can see if you’re meeting your budget. Don’t worry – when you start to get close to spending your money in a certain category, it shows that category in orange – proceed with caution.
Schedule all things financial
A common complaint about finances is that people simply forget to pay bills or they are not organized enough to remember everything. Simply ender recurring bills, loan payments, and income, and this product will remind you when your payment is upcoming.
Investment portfolio information
If you own stocks, bonds, CDs, mutual funds, or other types of similar investments, you can track the performance.
Customize with extensions
This product allows you to add on certain extensions according to your need. You can get a credit card payoff calculator, debt payoff calculator, an investment profit calculator, or other important tools.
Reports and Graphs
A picture is worth a 1000 words. There is no better way to get an overall look at your financial situation than through a visual report. Built-in reports and graphs include: Budget, Missing Checks, Net Worth, Account Balances, Cash Flow, Transactions, Cost Basis, Income vs. Expenses, and VAT/GST.
Protect your privacy – and your peace of mind
You can save this product with a password for safety and privacy. Depending on your comfort level, you can locally store password information on your own computer or manually enter it each time you want to update your accounts.
International support
If you live overseas or travel overseas with any frequency, then Moneydance will be hard to beat. They offer multi-currency support and translations into eight different language. On the homepage, you can automatically track the latest exchange rates.
What Do I Like About Moneydance?
- Clean interface. From the very first time, this product was easy to use. Things are where you would expect them to be and everything looks clean and crisp.
- Foreign currency features – since we live overseas, this was a big one for us.
- Easy graphs and charts
- The price. The $49.99 cost with no required upgrades is much less than what we paid for Quicken.
- Budgeting feature. For some time, my wife has been less than satisfied with the Excel documents I worked up. She claims they are confusing and hard to navigate. The primary features we use are the transaction registers and budgeting.
What Don’t I Like About Moneydance?
My biggest problem with it was that it was not really a smooth transfer from Quicken. They have just recently come out with a user guide that will help make the transition easier. When I exported and imported files, I had to adjust and doctor it up. However, I did want to learn a new program and I did want to get away from Quicken, so I went through the learning curve.
I wish it was better able to sync with some sort of tax program. However, to be honest, I had that feature with Quicken, but never used it. For accuracy, I always manually calculated and reviewed everything myself.
Get Moneydance today
Buy your copy of Moneydance now – click here. Or get your free trial copy today. Remember if you buy The Secret to a Successful Budget you get a 20% off Moneydance coupon.
The free trial is the best feature of this product. You download a fully functional version of the software and you have the opportunity to enter up to 100 manual transactions into the software. Once you enter your 100th transaction, you can visit the Moneydance website and purchase a license key. Simply enter the license key into your existing software (under help), and you now have unlimited future use of the software – you don’t even need to download the software again.
All product links in this post are affiliate links.
Anyone else use Moneydance? What do you think?
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
cool a mac version. I may give it a try. Thanks.
@Financialbondage
I’m not a Mac user, but that is one of the things that people really like about it – Mac compatibility.
I’ve always done pencil and paper budgeting because it’s easier (for me) than learning a computer program from scratch… I just don’t have the patience to learn how to use the budgeting programs out there… at first glance, this program also seems a bit overwhelming. I’ll see what I can do… may have to stick with pencil and paper.
@Arthur
I hear you on the pen and paper approach. Nothing wrong with that.
I’ve been using this software for 18 months and I LOVE LOVE LOVE it!! I also have a Mac and it works great. I love how I can see exactly where every penny is going without much trouble at all.
A couple of downsides to Moneydance 2010:
Online BillPay compatibility with financial institutions; not every bank/credit union will work with MD2010 and you can’t find out which ones do or don’t until you shell out the $40 for the license. Don’t confuse the online banking capabilities listings with online BillPay.
The Reconciliation Tool, used to balance your accounts, requires you to have a *paper* copy of your bank statement. My Quicken 2007 (PC version) downloads all my cleared transactions (whenever I want) so I can compare and clear them without the need for a bank statement. Needing a bank statement to reconcile seems pretty lame in this day and age.
The included Help manual in MD2010 is for the 2008 version of the software; you need to go to a separate site to download the .pdf for the manual ….which then is not integral with MD2010.
Overall I have not been too impressed with MD2010 …especially not compared to my 2007 PC version of Quicken. If this is considered good software, the bad stuff must be truly awful.
@Mike
Thanks for your feedback. I think it will be very helpful for people considering Moneydance.
Re financial institutions: In my case the same two banks that would not ‘automatically’ download with Quicken will not download with Moneydance. I suspect that if you shot them an email they could tell you if your bank was included before you made the purchase.
Thanks for the heads up regarding the Reconciliation tool.
As of April 14th they have a 2010 help manual – http://moneydance.com/blog/archives/119.
Downloading your bank info (i.e. transactions) works well and you can see a list of the banks Moneydance is known to be compatible with (it’s posted on their website).
What I am referring to is the ability to pay your bills through Moneydance …the BillPay interface with your bank …this is the function that can be a bit “iffy” depending on your financial institution. You may have no problems with setting up online payment capabilities; you may have to contact your financial institution directly; you may have to *pay* for this feature (even though it might be free from your bank’s online payment service) when used via Moneydance …or you might not be able to use it at all. There is no listing of compatibility with BillPay services and Moneydance; the folks at InfiniteKind (the developers of Moneydance) tend to keep this compatibility aspect very quiet; it is buried in the manual: “Note that not every financial institution which Moneydnace supports for online banking will allow application-based online bill payment….” (from pgs 41,42 of MD2010 User’s Guide). Since the online banking feature is not activated until you pay/register the software there’s no sure way to know beforehand. At this point InfiniteKind is still gathering data on BillPay compatibilities (there is a response to this situation in their help blog) but it is ultimately up to your financial institution’s policies ….which can and often do change …with regard to application-based online bill paying.
@Mike- I’m a Moneydance support staff member, and I wanted to clarify a few pieces of your comment.
We’re a small company, and when we released Moneydance 2010 we made a few mistakes. The biggest one was not integrating the new help documentation into the program, and we’re just now getting that issue resolved. We understand now this was a serious issue for our users, and will be sure not to make this mistake again.
The online banking and bill pay feature is active in the trial version. We also provide full support to users who are using the trial version. Basically, we want people to be able to try out the full program and then decide if they would like to buy our product- this feels fair to us. The only limitation of the trial version is the 100 manually entered transaction limit. I’m sorry this wasn’t clear to you, we’re working on revamping our website so this information is clearer. Honesty and transparency are important to us as a company.
There are two ways to connect to banks online- through their websites and through a specially dedicated server (this is known as a direct OFX connection). Many banks charge a fee for connection to their direct OFX server, either for downloads or bill pay. Most banks do not charge for connection to their website. We know that for a few banks Moneydance’s bill-pay tool is sometimes “iffy,” and we continue to work on diagnosing and resolving this issue, but it’s been a sticky one.
Quicken allows you to connect to your bank’s website through their program or through the OFX server, Moneydance only connects to OFX servers. The reasons for this are complex- technological, licensing, and proprietary software to name a few. We’re looking toward integrating a third party system which would permit us to connect to more financial institutions directly through Moneydance, but it’s a major project and is several months away.
As for the reconcile tool- You don’t need a paper statement to do this, although when we describe the process in our help guide we use that as an example. We felt it was the best way to describe the process for those who are new to personal finance software. When you begin the reconciling process you are given the option to select an “As Of” box. “Selecting the ‘as of’ option will automatically mark all downloaded transactions posted on or before the given date as ‘reconciling’. This often results in an easier reconciliation process, however you should also double-check your transactions as they are downloaded.” This can greatly simplify this reconciling process for those who download their transactions into Moneydance.
If I can be of further assistance, please feel free to contact me (and our other support staff) by emailing us at support at moneydance dot com.
@Angie
Thanks for taking the time to respond to these comments. I’ve found that Moneydance has the important features I need, but I don’t understand all the details like you obviously do. Thanks for helping clarify things.
@Mike
See Angie’s comment in response – honestly some of thsi discussion gets out of my knowledge. I actually don’t use any bill pay features so I don’t know much about it.
After mulling over Mike’s comments I spent some time today improving the phrasing on our website. We’ve clarified the functions (and limitations) of the trial version on our “Download” page, more obviously referred to the trial on our “Purchase” page, and overtly stated that many banks charge for direct connect and bill pay services on our “Financial Institution” page.
We’ll also be releasing our next full stable (as opposed to preview) update, Moneydance 2010 r3 build 748, in the next 2 days. This version will correct the user guide issue and brings some wonderful new features, including new reports, which were not available in the last stable build (r3build 735).
While it’s sometimes hard to hear criticism, we believe it’s also important to learn from our mistakes. As always, you can contact us at support at moneydance dot com.
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