Investing at Your Fingertips: Quicken’s new ability to download investment transactions frees you from onerous data entry and helps eliminate errors. Moneydance is improving rapidly–two updates arrived before this review was completed–but it has a long way to go before it can challenge Quicken as the Mac’s personal-finance leader. In virtually every financial area, Quicken’s tools are more complete and easier to use than their Moneydance equivalents. But even at the higher price, Quicken provides much more value than Moneydance. Moneydance 3.2 is less expensive than Quicken 2002 Deluxe, but the latter’s $20 rebate for owners of previous versions (including those that shipped with iMacs) means that for many users the two are effectively the same price. And more than once, I lost data while switching between windows to edit transactions. For example, it showed the correct transaction price in the register for a bond purchase but got it wrong in the portfolio overview window. And investment handling is nowhere near as convenient as it is in Quicken you must update all your information, including stock prices, manually rather than downloading it from the Internet.īesides the interface hurdles, Moneydance has a number of bugs. For example, there’s no way to mark expenses as tax related so you can track your deductions at tax time. You enter split transactions in a second window that requires many clicks and keystrokes, and another window’s poor design makes it difficult to add your own expense and income categories. Entering data is less convenient, because creating new transactions takes both the keyboard and the mouse. Even then, you’re much more limited in Moneydance than in Quicken. Until Appgen fixes these importing bugs, Moneydance is usable only if you plan to do all your data entry from scratch. Moneydance also failed to identify investment accounts correctly it placed the imported data into bank accounts, which prevented me from using the portfolio-tracking features (once an account is created, you can’t convert it from bank to investment). Out of 28 accounts exported from Quicken 2002, only 3 imported with the correct transactions and balances, and the program created dozens of blank accounts. After importing my Quicken data from a QIF file, Moneydance thought I owned stocks worth $4.8 billion if that were true, I assure you that someone else would have written this review. You can’t import Quicken data into Moneydance, and although the hype on the program’s box boasts of its ability to import files in Quicken Interchange Format (QIF), doing so yields unintentionally hilarious results. If you’ve been thinking of switching to Moneydance from Quicken or another financial program, think again. You can’t initiate a new transaction, such as a stock purchase, within Quicken you’ll have to do that at your broker’s Web site. You can download information on purchases, sales, and dividend payments for stock and mutual funds. Quicken 2002 adds transaction downloading from brokerages–a great convenience, especially if you do a lot of trading. If they match, Quicken reconciles the account if there’s a problem, you’re given the opportunity to reconcile them manually. After downloading your transactions, the program checks the online balance against your Quicken register. Like the Mac OS’s Keychain, this feature lets you access everything with one master password.Īnother terrific new feature for online banking users is automatic checkbook reconciliation. PIN Vault, another new feature, stores all the passwords or PIN numbers for your different online accounts. You can download banking data andĬredit card transactions, send bill payments, and get stock quotes in a single session rather than connecting to each financial institution separately. One Step Update, a feature long enjoyed by Windows users but new to the Mac, lets you perform all your online transactions with one click.
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