Wow, Wow, Intuit just Wow
Years waiting for an “Upgraded” App and this is what you come up with?
$70.00 and it loses core features of an earlier version!?
NO Full feature Investment module
NO integration with Turbo Tax (errr who makes that again?)
NO Bill Pay

But hey the colored windows look pretty.
Just put in all your password and codes so we can nicely collate your data, and market it to 3rd parties..

Why oh why does the CEO of Intuit sit on Apple’s Board…....

From Intuits Web Site:

If you need more more advanced investment features, try Quicken Mac 2007.

Quicken Essentials for Mac does not support that capability. If you’d like that functionality, we recommend trying Quicken Mac 2007.

While you cannot pay bills within the product itself (“direct bill pay”), you can track your bills and make sure you have enough cash to pay them when they’re due. A few alternatives available include using Quicken Mac 2007

Its Back to the Future time…..

Meh.

I’ve used Moneydance for years. There was a time when I would happily have bought a decent version of Quicken for Mac, but they dropped the ball big time. I now have no intention of getting Quicken, nor will I ever.

In fact, I once sent in a request to Apple to release a personal finance package. So far no joy. Would be a nice addition to iWork, though.

Wheeles,
Yeah would be nice
unfortunately I think the name “iBank is already taken.

aaplcrazie - 25 February 2010 03:48 PM

Wheeles,
Yeah would be nice
unfortunately I think the name “iBank is already taken.

No other iWork app has an “i” as a prefix.

yikes I will apply some self flailing with some wet noodles
for my epic fail in nomenclature

aaplcrazie - 25 February 2010 04:20 PM

yikes I will apply some self flailing with some wet noodles
for my epic fail in nomenclature

LOL!

aaplcrazie - 25 February 2010 03:48 PM

... unfortunately I think the name “iBank is already taken.

Indeed it is. iBank

My wife took a look at it as a potential replacement for Quicken 2003, but didn’t like it. Supposedly, it will allow you to track long and short puts and calls, so I might check it out for tracking that.

Edit: Downloaded Moneydance and imported our Quicken file into it. At first blush, it looks pretty good. Momma’s willing to give it a go.

I was all set to go with Quicken. We need to upgrade from our old Quicken so it was logical. We have Q03 so most of the missing online features others are complaining about we haven’t been using anyway.

But now that I’ve looked at Moneydance we may go that route. More features, less expensive, more likely to be able to import our old files (Intuit will only guarantee being able to import as far back as Q06). Most importantly I can buy it online and download it. None of our local stores seem to be interested in carrying Quicken for Mac so we’d be waiting for a package to make it over the border.

It’ll be up to SWMBO. She does the books around here.

I use iWork Numbers to keep my records of income, check register, business expenses, school expenses, and so on. Then I transfer data manually into TurboTax.

I have a sheet and chart for vehicle expense that include tallies of gallons bought, MPG,  miles driven,  maintenance and repair, average daily operating cost and miles driven, highest and lowest price per gallon. I created it mostly as a Numbers learning experience

CaptainBoom - 25 February 2010 04:48 PM

Edit: Downloaded Moneydance and imported our Quicken file into it. At first blush, it looks pretty good. Momma’s willing to give it a go.

It may not suit everyone, but I use it to track numerous bank accounts and all my trades. The developer is fairly responsive. I know there’s a new beta out but I am still running the 2009 version.

Does anyone know of a non-remote financial app that not only records trades, but can also calculate wash sales for gains/loss statements?

Hmm, there doesn’t seem to be too much discussion of banking apps here.  It seems people don’t like the new Quicken and the only suggestion I’ve heard is Moneydance.

I don’t trust Quicken at all, seeing how slow their development process is.  I’ve been using the beta of Cha-Ching, but I don’t like it enough to purchase when they finally end the beta.  There seems to have been little progress made recently and too many annoyances hanging around with too few features to be worthwhile.

So I think I’ll check out Moneydance.  I like that it runs on all major platforms.  It looks too much like a simplistic ledger, though, which I don’t really like (especially the separate payments/deposits columns) ... but I’ll play with it a bit.

I first started using Moneydance when OS X was in the initial beta, so getting on for 10 years now. It is very much a simple ledger format, but it does have some reporting functionality and graphing. There is the option to connect to an assortment of banks remotely, but I’ve not done that.

I do download my trades from Thinkorswim and load them in, but I do run a program that I wrote to massage the data into the form I want (eg change the trade description field). It will download the previous day’s closing prices for any stock you’ve traded (provided you set it up correctly).

There may be a wash sale feature in the trade recording side of things, but as I’m in the UK I’ve not looked too hard at that.

There’s a loan pay-off calculator, foreign currency rates tracking and reminders. I think you can also print cheques but I’ve not done that.

I may sound like I work for the developer, but I don’t. It just fits my needs adequately and I’ve never found a reason to change, or another product that is suitable. It does have its quirks, like trying to transfer a sum of money from one account in one currency into one in another currency can be tricky to input correctly, but I’ve learnt how to deal with the quirks.

Unfortunately Moneydance will not allow a split that includes an account (i.e. a payment that includes interest expense and reduction of debt principal, so I am stuck with Quicken (now 2007); NONE of the other programs I have tried will allow this.  I can’t tell if QEM allows it from the very poor information on the Intuit website and am not going to buy it to try it out.  In fact compared with the information available for Moneydance, iBank and others, Intuit seems to be intentionally hiding information about QEM’s capabilities.  And if I have missed something, please do let me know.

I am one of the (few) folks that paid for and downloaded the new Quicken Essentials, mostly because I needed the transfer process from Quicken 2007 to go as smoothly as possible.  Sure enough, all of my data was transferred seamlessly.  I know that Quicken has gotten a bad name in the past, and for good reason.  But considering they’re under new management, I was willing to give it a try.  I have to say, it’s actually a very nice piece of software. 

Positives:
-Cocoa app
-Budgeting tools are great
-Simple, responsive interface, and very Mac-like
-great search features
-very nice graphs and charts

Negatives:
-price- this is really the biggest indication that Quicken treats Mac users poorly, but again, I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt
-No online bill-pay (big drawback for me), but I suspect it will come
-No meaningful investment tracking (not a big deal for me)
-No TurboTax export (again, not a biggy for me)

There may be other smaller positives and negatives, and there are a few good reviews of banking apps for the mac floating around:

-http://mac360.com/index.php/mac360/comments/top_10_best_mac_money_apps_to_replace_quicken/
-http://mac360.com/index.php/mac360/comments/first_look_new_quicken_essentials_for_mac_is_here/
-http://robpickering.com/technology/2010/2/21/ibank-your-quicken-alternative.html

I’ve used iBank, MoneyDance, and Moneywell.  All are nice programs, but honestly if Quicken adds a few bits of functionality, it will again be #1 for the mac.  iBank was buggy and dog-slow!  Moneywell was nice also, but I couldn’t get used to the ‘bucket’ system.  MoneyDance was nice and feature-rich, but I’m hesitant to use a program which is non-Cocoa these days (just my OCD).

And (for us at least)  the Winner is….

Moneydance

We spent a couple of hours checking it out today. We can do splits on both debits and credits. It imported our ancient Quicken data without missing a beat. The demo version is full featured except that it can only take 100 transactions* so we could try everything. SWMBO really likes the reporting and tracking features. It looks like a winner and we’ve just scratched the surface of what it can do.

*The limit only became an issue once during testing. Not thinking about the limit we tried to import all our Quicken data, many thousands of transactions. It hung Moneydance hard. However after force quitting the program restarting it, and then bringing over just Feb 2010 it imported fine. It even kept all existing accounts, splits, categories and everything. After registering Moneydance we imported ~12 years worth of Quicken data with no problem.