Moneydance is a budgeting tool similar to Quicken but only charges a one time fee of $49.99, rather than expensive monthly charges.
- Moneydance 2015 5 – Personal Finance Manager Job Description
- Moneydance 2015 5 – Personal Finance Manager Resume
- Issues With Moneydance Software
- Moneydance Review
- Moneydance Personal Finance Reviews
With Moneydance you can monitor your banking and investment accounts all in one place – using your computer and phone. It’s also possible to handle multi-currency transactions and pay your bills directly from Moneydance.
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This in-depth Moneydance review can help you decide if this is the best premium personal finance app for managing your money.
How Moneydance Works
Moneydance is free for the first 100 transactions. After that, you can purchase the software for a one time fee of $49.99.
What makes Moneydance different than most apps is its open-source API. Developers can create customized extensions that add new financial tools without upgrading to a new software version every year.
Some of the core Moneydance capabilities include:
- Tracking bank, digital wallet, and credit card transactions
- Online bill pay
- Categorizing transactions and budgeting
- Monitoring investment account performance
- Multi-currency transactions
Moneydance is a robust platform. Your entire financial universe assembles in one place. Moneydance can automatically download financial transactions and sort them into their proper categories. You can also build a custom budgeting strategy including importing your existing budget spreadsheets.
Accessing all your accounts in one place makes tracking your money simple. Your Moneydance charts and graphs give you a visual picture of where your money's going. The charting can be particularly beneficial for anyone with difficulty tracking spending.
Many budget-focused apps have mediocre investment tracking – at best. Moneydance can track your savings, mutual funds, stocks, bonds, and other investments. Not only does it keep track of your investments, but it also displays the performance of each.
You can also pay bills from the app, as well as receive alerts to remind you when payments are due. The last feature can save you money by helping you to avoid late fees.
Like any personal finance app, there is a small learning curve to efficiently navigate the software. Moneydance is not frustration-free. There can be programming bugs with importing data files and syncing your accounts. But you will find that with any software.
Moneydance Download Options
Moneydance remains a “desktop-first” budgeting app and is compatible with these operating systems:
- Windows (7+)
- macOS (10.11+)
- Linux
The Android or Apple mobile app is a good companion and syncs with your desktop using Dropbox. However, the Moneydance mobile app lacks many desktop features and other cloud-based apps are better.
Moneydance is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, as well as iOS and Android mobile phones.
Moneydance Key Features
The many banking and investment features can make Moneydance the only personal finance app you use. Most apps specialize in either budgeting or tracking net worth and investments. It’s not often that you can do both with one program.
Online Banking
You probably have online banking through each individual bank but what if you have several accounts in two or more banks?
The Moneydance online banking can be a serious benefit when you have accounts at multiple banks. You can access each account from the same app.
Moneydance automatically downloads your transactions, then automatically categorizes them to help you track your spending. You can also make payments directly from the app.
Bill Pay
Some budgeting apps are excellent at tracking your finances and money goals. However, you must still use your bank app to schedule single or recurring online bill payments. Moneydance lets you pay bills from its platform using Direct Connect – the same program that Quicken and Quickbooks use.
Many national and regional banks support Moneydance for online bill payments and downloading transactions.
Payment Reminders
You can use this tool to schedule either individual payments or recurring transactions. Use it and you'll never forget a payment again.
Moneydance Summary
This is your high altitude view – the big picture of your finances.
Some “all in one” finance apps excel at aggregating your account data but make it difficult to navigate your accounts.
The Moneydance summary dashboard provides these details:
- Account balances
- Upcoming and overdue transactions
- Payment reminders
- Foreign exchange rate information
While everything is summarized on one page, you can click on an account, or choose one from the drop-down list, to go directly to that account. There you can enter transactions, or reconcile your account.
Categorizing Transactions
Moneydance allows you to set budgets by category, for example, you may set a budget for restaurants. When a transaction comes into your checking account for a restaurant you can categorize that as such.
It’s also possible to assign “tags” to the transactions you categorize too. These tags can be handy when running budget reports and analyzing spending trends. For example, you might tag all of your expenses while on vacation as “travel”. You can then pull reports and see exactly how much your recent vacation was.
Account Registers
Here you can enter or delete transactions, or make any edits necessary. It's set up like a traditional checkbook, but it automatically calculates your balances and sorts your transactions. It also has an auto-complete feature for recurring transactions to save time.
Graphing Tool
The graphing tools enable you to generate visual reports tracking both your income and expenses.
Wimoweh 1 1 68 12. You can create any type of graph you're comfortable with, and customize it with the desired date range and any other parameters you choose. Graphs can also be printed or saved on your computer.
Some of the available graphs include:
- Account balances
- Asset allocation for investments
- Income and expenses
- “Memorized graphs” (Customizable graphs that update continually)
- Net worth
Budget Reports
You may also appreciate the in-depth analysis that budget reports offer. These reports can make it easy to track your personal or business figures.
Some of the potential budget reports include:
- Account balances
- Budget performance
- Cash flow
- Income and expenses
- Missing checks
- Reconciling transactions
- Tag summary of categorized transactions
- Transfers
- VAT/GST applicable expenses and total tax paid
There are multiple investment performance reports you can run too. For instance, some of the investment-related reports let you track cost basis, capital gains, portfolio performance, and transactions.
Investment Tracking
Tracking your investments is where Moneydance departs from many of the pure budgeting apps. It enables you to follow your investments not only by updating the total value of your portfolio but also by providing the performance of individual securities.
You can track stocks, bonds, certificates of deposit, mutual funds, and just about any other type of investment.
You can customize investment tracking by setting it to automatically download daily security prices. It can also help you to perform cost basis computations, as well as to account for stock splits.
Foreign Currency Transactions
If you do any foreign currency transactions or have a foreign-based bank account, you'll really appreciate this feature.
Moneydance can handle multiple currencies and will make automatic conversions. It keeps a history of conversion rates too so your transaction from two years ago uses an accurate figure from that exact day.
There's no need to get out your calculator and look up daily exchange rates. It all happens automatically.
Moneydance Pricing
Moneydance can be purchased for a flat fee of $49.99. This one-time fee is an advantage over competing platforms that have monthly fees or a recurring annual fee.
You can make your one-time fee upfront, then use the app forever. Payment can be made by Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, PayPal, or Amazon gift cards.
Each personal license is good for every computer in your household with unlimited use.
For businesses, Moneydance requests one license per computer or data file (whichever is smaller). You can share data files between multiple computers and only buy one license.
Moneydance 2015 5 – Personal Finance Manager Job Description
Free Trial Period for Your First 100 Manual Transactions
Moneydance 2015 5 – Personal Finance Manager Resume
Moneydance offers a free trial for your first 100 manually entered transactions. You have full access to the app during the trial period. Once you reach that threshold, you can make the one-time payment and continue using the app. Or not.
The Moneydance app comes with a 90-day money back guarantee. If you're not happy for any reason, you can return the product for a full refund.
Upgrade Policy
After you purchase the software you get one free major release update. After your free update, you will receive subsequent updates at half price.
Quicken, and most other software packages, makes you pay full freight with each major upgrade.
Moneydance vs Quicken
Moneydance and Quicken are two of the most powerful personal finance programs on the market. Quicken offers a similar experience to Moneydance for PC and Mac. Both programs require a desktop download and their mobile apps syncs with your desktop file. Quicken dropped its cloud-only data storage a few years ago.
You might prefer Quicken as this program may sync with more banks and brokerages. And, Quicken offers chat and phone support while Moneydance only offers email support.
However, Quicken charges of yearly fee of either $34.99, $44.99 or $74.99 depending on your plan tier.
There are two great reasons to consider Moneydance instead of Quicken. First, personal households pay a one-time $49.99 for a lifetime license. The most similar Quicken plan tier costs $74.99 per year.
A second advantage of Moneydance is its customization potential. Developers can create extensions that don’t require you to upgrade to the latest version to enjoy. Quicken is more likely to require forced updates if you want to continue using their product.
One tidbit most long-time Quicken users may not know is that Intuit sold Quicken in 2016. A private equity firm now owns the platform but Intuit still owns the Quicken trademark. Intuit wants to focus their efforts on Quickbooks and TurboTax.
Here's our full review of Quicken.
Moneydance Pros and Cons
Moneydance Pros:
- Reasonably priced: The one-time fee of $49.99 is quite reasonable for a personal finance app that does all that Moneydance can.
- One-time fee: If you're looking for a budgeting software app, the last thing you need is another monthly expense for the app itself. Moneydance spares you the extra hit.
- Not cloud-based: If you are worried about your data being stored in the cloud, Moneydance doesn't. It's stored locally. The Moneydance mobile app syncs with your desktop file to update your financial accounts in real-time.
- License is for personal use and per household: You don't need to pay per install, pay per person using it, or how many computers you use it on. It's one license per household for as many computers as you want.
- Free Trial: You can “test drive” Moneydance for 100 transactions. If you like what you see, you can pay the fee, and continue using it. If you don't, you can simply drop it and move on.
- The 90-day guarantee: This gives you the opportunity to back out with a full refund if you decide you're not happy with the app, even after you complete the initial 100 transactions.
- Digital reconciliation: You can balance your accounts and reconcile transactions, as well as detect fraudulent activity in any of your accounts.
- Currency conversion: Not everyone regularly engages in foreign transactions, but if you do, Moneydance is the personal finance app for you.
Moneydance Cons:
- Feels cluttered: The dashboard tends to be a bit cluttered and could be especially confusing if you have a large number of accounts included and are still learning the system.
- Importing is tricky: This is not uncommon. To import data you need to make sure the data is exported into a QIF file, which is an ASCII text file generated by Quicken. QIF stands for Quicken
- Interchange Format.
- Limited customer service: Receiving a tech support response may take longer than with other budget software. The Moneydance knowledge base answers many FAQs and you have email support access.
Is Moneydance Worth It?
Moneydance offers a free trial for 100 transactions and a 90-day money-back guarantee, so you can give it a reasonable test drive to see if you like it.
There are so many different budgeting software apps out there and it often comes down to which you'll be the most comfortable with. Some are fairly simple in nature, like EveryDollar, and others are slightly more complicated, like Quicken. Moneydance could be the app that works for you. If not, here's our list of some great personal finance apps.
It goes beyond pure budgeting, by offering investment tracking and currency conversions. These will be more important to you if you have multiple investment accounts or regular foreign transactions.
If you'd like more information, visit the Moneydance website.
9.5
Strengths
- Account aggregator with billpay
- Budgeting & Investment Tracking
- Foreign exchange tracking
- Not cloud based
- 100 transaction free trial
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I’m overjoyed to announce the fourth update to Moneydance 2015! This version is packed full of bug fixes and improvements, many of which were reported or requested by our wonderful customers. We appreciate all of your feedback and look forward to incorporating more of it into future updates!
If you’ve purchased Moneydance 2014 or 2015, then this update is completely free. Anyone who purchased an older version of Moneydance gets a stupendous 50% off the regular price when upgrading through the website; just a small thank you for being a loyal customer. As usual, we never force you to upgrade Moneydance: old versions will continue working for just as long as you like. We never “sunset” features or services, so if you purchase Moneydance you won’t end up on a never-ending upgrade treadmill.
As always, you can download Moneydance 2015 here, or if you are updating from a previous version, here. I’m happy to say that Moneydance 2015 is finally available directly from the Mac App Store:
Issues With Moneydance Software
If you see the old version of Moneydance on the Mac App Store then please retry after an hour as the change may still be propagating through Apple’s system.
Please note however that the Mac App Store version of Moneydance is limited in some ways including not having the extension/plugin installer and receiving less frequent updates.
Moneydance Review
Here’s the full list of improvements in this update:
Moneydance Personal Finance Reviews
- If a report row references a split transaction, ‘drilling down’ into it now opens the transaction in the entry account register rather than the category register
- Batch changing the category now works for bank transactions in investment account registers
- Handle foreign currency information when importing/downloading transactions
- Show security name in lot matching window title
- Tweak report title font size
- Fixed loop when cancelling lot matching window
- Sort transactions by date in detailed cash flow report
- Improve consistency in reports when showing the description and memo fields for the other sides of transactions
- Show the new-transaction panel at the top of the register when the sort order has more recent transactions appearing at the top
- Unset reconciling status when duplicating a cleared transaction, since the duplicate should be considered new.
- Show more consistent description and memo fields in transaction reports
- Fixed bug that is often triggered by removing certain budgets from the sidebar
- When re-connecting an account to an OFX service, we no longer reset the last-download date so that the next connection doesn’t re-download all available transactions (which could go back quite a while)
- Tab/comma-delimited exports now properly format dates
- Fix bug in which expanded/collapsed sidebar section state was not preserved
- Many behind-the-scenes improvements to budget bars and account selection
- Move File->Export Archive menu to just below the regular Export menu
- Fix bug that caused inter-currency reminder notifications to have any prices/rates overwritten when being applied
- Updated linux installers/packages to use java 1.8.0_45
- Fixed summary screen budgets in which the selected budget (or whether a budget was selected) wouldn’t be remembered, resulting in lots of “not in budget” labels appearing for categories which were actually in a budget
- Fix bug that excluded certain possible buy transactions from lot matching
- Fix bug that caused the ‘available shares’ column to be inaccurate when matching stock purchase/sale lots
- Fix a sorting error that could occur when opening an insanely huge register full of transactions with the same date and entry date-time
- Under-the-hood changes relating to transaction sorting
- Hopefully fix an issue in which investment performance graphs don’t adjust for splits until after a restart immediately after updating from Moneydance 2014
- Automatically select the budget item row when editing a budget item
- Fix budget editor/viewer bug that used way more CPU than necessary
- Ensure security/stock splits are always sorted to make sure that security history graphs and calculations are properly computed
- Avoid stack overflow errors in cases when account hierarchies are broken (such as if an account is set as its own parent)
- Add CA certificate for SecureTrust to allow Marshland FCU to work
- Fixed bug in which an account could possibly be set as the parent of one of it’s ancestors, causing a rift in space-time
- Fix sidebar scrollbar background colour on windows
- Fix alignment of preference options for decimal points
- Make budget bar font more readable and match new theme better
- Added preference setting to use higher contrast colours
- Slight improvement to performance when showing unconfirmed transaction details or transaction attachments in the register
- Fixed bug in which no transaction attachments were displayed for transactions with more than one attachment
- Improved presentation of transaction attachments
- Set a sensible name for print jobs
- Restore the ability to request a wider date range for certain banks when downloading transactions
- Fix bug when syncing updates to split transactions from mobile devices
- Fix bug in the install-extensions window
- Fix horrible title font size and lack of antialiasing in printed reports
- Fix foreground colour differences in bank vs investment registers
- Add fields/settings for credit card accounts: payment type, rate expiration, etc (merged from Debt Insights extension)
- Show transaction details in a slightly more readable format (no more XML ugliness)
- Add a DebtPaymentSpec account setting to the core API (merged from Debt Insights extension)
- Exclude inactive accounts from the download all action.
- Fix for garbled text bug that affects some Windows computers.
- Vastly improve UI performance when many values are updated in many different parts of the UI
- Duplicated investment transactions now retain their internal tags which identify the kind of transaction (ie Dividend, MiscIncome, etc)
- Added a marker to future transactions that has high contrast with the foreground/background colours to ensure that they stand out for all types of colour-blindness
- Improved lot matching UI to prevent buy transactions from displaying when no sell transaction is selected
- Implement probably undetectable speedups
- Fixed bug in which lot matching information from MD2014 was not reflected in the MD2015 UI
- Added Symantec intermediate CA certificate to allow trusted connections to Hilliard Lyons bank (which doesn’t send the intermediate cert).
- Use numeric/monospaced font for values in security detail
- Added Verisign Root CA Certificate
- Fix bug in which online banking payee list changes are not saved across restarts
- Minor fix for locale display in preferences
- Use a 64 bit number when calculating the next check number, to avoid overflow in very rare circumstances
- Added Dutch Locale (thanks to Gideon van Melle!)
- updated German text (thanks to Marc Kaulisch!)
- More tweaking of the font used for numeric fields
- Transactions recorded locally from an online bill payment now use the “processing” date provided by the bank upon submission of the payment, but only if it makes sense.
- The online bill payment panel now requests confirmation before deleting a payee or cancelling a payment
- No longer use light-grey for the second row of transaction details in the register
- Increase contrast between foreground and background colours in the register; especially for future transactions.
- Use numeric/monospaced font for rates and foreign amounts in the register
- Trying out some alternative fonts for numeric values
- Temporarily restrict secure connections to TLS1 because BB&T’s (and other bank’s) OFX servers will not negotiate a TLS1.1 or 1.2 connection
- When submitting online bill payments, if the bank returns a “processed date” of today then use the payment date
- When matching downloaded transactions that have check numbers, allow a 3x wider date window for potential merges
- Fixed bug in which duplicating an existing mixed-interval (old style) budget caused the copy to become a new style budget
- Entries in the transaction entry payee/description popup and now sorted properly