best financial software for mac

The good news is that I just upgraded to Mountain Lion. As you may know, Quicken in any version does not work with this OS.

Bull! Q'07 for Lion works w/o issues in SL, Lion, and ML. I've been using it for almost a year w/ML (I beta tested it). So, your experience isn't normal.

baltwo - First, please let me say I meant no offense to your reply. I see now when I wrote my reply, I wrote 'bash on quicken reply' and that could have been interpreted as directed at your replies and I apologize. I am very glad you've had an experience with Q07 dissimilar to mine. You also replied to my statement '...heard stories that the Lion version wasn't good.' This too could be misinterpreted. Specifically, I was again referring to Quicken and what other posts have said, not Lion OS. I bypassed Lion so I have no experience with it.

I suppose this is a great example of the well used phrase 'you can't believe everything you read.' As such, I may try the Q07 upgrade for $15.00 since you have had such a good experience and seem to endorse it robustly. For me it will still very likely be a parting gesture from Q07. The fact it's still Q07 might suggest it's time for a revamped Q13 perhaps?

Life's too short. I have no intention of a flame war on this support page. Can we agree that my 18 years or so with Quicken, although not "normal" as you say, has been fraught with expensive calls to the support center, days of re-entering data corrupted for unknown reasons, and faulty Quicken backups which I was told by Quicken support was due to an apparent unnoticed corruption to the database which propagated through all my backups. When the corrupted data finally triggered problems, it was too late. I began a spiral notebook on support calls and all the things they tried so when it happened again I would have the resources at hand to try again. It appears my major support calls run on about an 14 to 15 month period.

Again, I apologize if you or anyone took offense, and I thank you and all for the cathartic moment.

I have started to have problems with iBank since the download of v.4.6.1. It appears to be failing to save transactions. I recently had to re-enter a considerable number of transactions that were not shown on my register even though I had saved them. I also had to re-do a reconciliation that was lost even though it was locked after original entry. Luckily, I keep manual records so the only thing I lost was the time.

I've been able to work with their reports formats though they are quirky and not the best. You can't enter the title of the report on the document. All you get is a generic type of report title.

Since it's January 1, I'm beginning to look elsewhere for a package that works better than iBank 4.6.1 appears to be working. I'm reading the other posts with great interest.

crtolson wrote:

baltwo - First, please let me say I meant no offense to your reply.

No offense taken, my skin's thicker than most other's. 😉

My reply was to point out that Q '07 for Lion works w/o issues, no matter what some might post. It's still the best of anything out there for the Mac OS, even though it doesn't mimic the windoze version. There's enough FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) going around, that I reacted a bit strongly. Have a happy new year.

Harry2007,

I hope you've had some luck finding satisfactory software. I'm still looking, as my very old version of Quicken, which worked fine for me for 10 years, is no longer compatible with Mac Mtn. Lion on my new Mac, or Snow Leopard (on my PowerBook).

What's one to make of the extreme discordance betweet the rave review of Money (by Jumsoft) on the Tech Review site and the contrasting negative reviews by users here:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/money3/id402410845?mt=12 ????

The discordance certainly doesn't inspire my confidence in Money, and other responses here have me considering formatting Excel to do my relatively simple bookkeeping -- not really, but it sounds like I'd at least know what I was getting for my money.

I also have been using Quicken for years for personal finance and Quickbooks (on a PC) for my business. I have not been at all satisfied with Intuit's inability to keep pace with Mac upgrades. I already needed to convert to Q Essentials when I upgraded to Lion, and lost significant transaction detail in the process. I just got off the phone with Quicken support, who I called when I noticed that my investment detail is now missing. The answer was that I needed to pay $79.99 for them to find and restore my data. Really? There is no problem with my computer, my other files, or even my banking data. All of my investments are gone, and I'm expected to pay Intuit to get them back. No thank you.

Actually Baltwo, Crtolson's experience is NOT all that unusual. Quicken corrupted and killed data on my finances, and considering how pitifully easy my finances were at the time, 2 bank accounts only with nothing else handled by Q, that is really telling about how little regard Quicken holds for its Apple customers.

Like LDDH, I refuse to give my money to a company that seems to only have contempt for me, and the way Quicken has treated its Apple products is truly contremptable.

So, you can tell me how wrong I am about Quicken, but like so many others, your ONE good experience is definitely out-weighed by several bad experiences by many other people. If any other company comes out with a relatively decent rival, Quicken for Mac is toast. It's only saving grace up to this point is that there is nothing that comes close to it in capabilities at the moment, but the Apple market share is growing by leaps and bounds and I fully expect that to change.

My reaction to this thread is that it's a repeat of many others since Lion came out. At that time, I tried almost every other Mac Financial program available and they were bad. I kept a bootable Snow Leopard to use with Quicken 07. Finally Intuit came out with the fix for '07 to use with Lion. I immediately applied it and have used it since. I do break my file once in a while to keep it a bit smaller to avoid problems as well as a bunch of backUps in case one gets corrupted. Until something better comes out, I will use Quicken. I have used it even in OS9 and on AppleII I think. Hopefully Intuit will do a full upgrade soon. Don't give up on it.

Early in 2012, the last time I tried to use my Quicken (older version), it suddenly deleted most all of my 2011 data. Up to that point I had occasional, but regular trouble with reports and "finds".

Like KMsimpson, I had 2 accounts to keep up - one checking and the other a credit card - should be simple.

And I, too, have been astounded at the customer service.

To lose all of that data was the last straw - no more Quicken for me. Im trying to adjust to neoOffice for a spreadsheet format - far from ideal. It is more readable and easier to edit than Apple's spreadsheet - for me anyway.

Am confounded as to why it seems so difficult for someone to design a replacement to quicken, specifically for Macs. Are the others really so bad ( I haven't tried iBank or any of the others)?

Hello to those searching for an alternative to Quicken for the Mac. I posted awhile back and have been researching, testing the waters, and thought I would update what I've found so far. Unfortunately I don't have the time to "demo" numerous products so this is biased for that reason alone.

First: I try to contact tech support and forums prior to purchase to get a feeling for what it would be like when a real problem crops up. I do this with many products before I purchase.

Two software packages caught my eye. MoneyWiz because they are really trying to enhance the experience of working with finances by providing a very nice looking user interface and iBank because it seemed more familiar or, dare I say it, Quicken-like in terms of visual format and arrangement (no offense to iBank!).

My experience so far is that iBank support has replied to 2 or 3 different emails even though I stated up front that I'm using the demo (which is fully functional for 30 days by the way). The replies were comprehensive and answered my queries and typically took a couple of days to hear from them. MoneyWiz was also responsive to a couple of emails. Unfortunately their demo version wasn't (isn't) available yet and I need to make a decision; tax season and all. I'm also not yet convinced of security for 'cloud-like' sync.(old school for now). MoneyWiz has a very nice looking glossy user interface and I'll be keeping a close eye on it in the future.

So with demo loaded, I am proceeding with iBank by first importing about a years worth of data (2011) which I exported from Quicken 2007 by way of a QIF file. (I would have exported more but as my earlier post stated, the earlier database and backups were all corrupted.) The file opened and imported my category list and my eight accounts without fault. With those familiar categories I'm off and running pretty quickly. Split transactions from 2011 did not import with the splits. I don't know if that's because QIF strips them out, or if iBank just doesn't recognize them but regardless, the transactions are in place and accounts set up. A few tweaks to change account types which defaulted to checking when they were savings but not a big deal.

Next, my method of capturing 2012 data was throughout the year I would go online and download QFX files periodically knowing this day would come and I would need to import data the bank would no longer have. I did not waste my time working in Quicken2007 last year. With QFX files from my larger transaction accounts I started by importing a few months for my home checking into iBank.

Through the import process, you are prompted with each transaction at first if you want to create a transaction template and it tells you how many transactions within the current import will be affected. In most cases I've said Yes and voila, every other matching transaction within the import changes to the same categorization as the first one. Click import and all you've agreed to drop into the main checking account. Now out of the import window you have two pretty cool things to work with before your next import; transaction templates and import templates. They sound laborious but they're not. The import template is very nice because it acts as a filter/find/replace for the next import. For example my gas bill downloaded from my bank shows a payee of something like "IGC QPT xb30783*" The numbers change each month so to get this to be recognized as "My Natural Gas Company" and categorize as Utilities:Gas_Electric, iBank gives you a variety of custom filters so next time, regardless of the payee numbers changing, IGC is interpreted just the way I want it and in words I understand.

The only quirk I have found is that when I cannot remember a category, I go to the pull down menu,"change category to: " and I'm provided a list of categories but when I select one, it doesn't fill in my transaction. Could be user error so I still need to work out whether it's me or iBank.

I still need to reconcile a statement and exercise other functions but I'll post again what I find. So far, iBank may not be perfect, or provide a glossy user interface, but it's encouraging and, yes, I'm paying for the license to move out of the demo. Wish me luck!

Like others here, I moved away from Quicken (which I loved and used for years) when I upgraded my Mac OS and couldn't upgrade Quicken. I had read good things about iBank so I bought it and started using it. Big mistake.

iBank does two very important things very poorly: reconciling accounts and subcategories. Their account reconciliation is just objectively wrong.

First, the developers don't seem to have any idea how to reconcile an account. It's a very simple math exercise: the bank's balance minus uncleared debits in iBank plus uncleared deposits in iBank should equal your iBank balance. Nothing about that has anything to do with time. If there's an uncleared transaction from 1981 it doesn't matter. By definition, reconciling an account factors in every transaction in the account's history. Yet, iBank insists on requiring the use of dates. If you don't get your starting and ending dates right (and iBank rarely guesses them correctly) you're doomed to failure. Their stubborn insistence on injecting dates into a simple math equation makes it a terrible experience and it is just simply incorrect, not a matter of opinion.

The second thing it does terribly is it doesn't roll up categories in reports. If I have a category "Utilities" with subcategories of "Water" and "Electric", running a report on on just the parent category should include the totals for "Water" and "Electric". It doesn't. That makes budgeting an almost painful proposition because you have to include every single subcategory, and add new subcategories to the budget as you create them. Terrible.

For these two reasons in particular I'm trying to find a replacement. How can you claim to be financial management software if you lack even a basic understanding of account reconciliation?

I switched back to Quicken 2007, which involved re-entering transactions from May 2012 from several accounts--very time consuming (except that I could download the last couple of months from my bank account). I also have a Mint.com account, which I use tangentially, but get this: You can't import Mint transactions into Quicken, even though they are both Intuit products!! How idiotic is that? Another strike against Intuit. Or Counter-Intuit as it should be called.

So I've been using Quicken for a couple of weeks, and it seems OK except that it periodically quits when I haven't been doing anything on it, so I haven't lost any information. I've stopped using iBank but haven't scrapped it from my computer yet, which causes another problem: every time I try to download transactions from my bank accounts, iBank launches and so I have to import downloaded transactions into Quicken instead of doing it directly. I don't know how to stop iBank from launching. That really gets me mad!

So far, I'm happier than with iBank, but not happy like the pre-Lion Quicken days.

Scott S. - My recent foray with the iBank demo has yet to include reconciliation. Now that it is importing properly and categories are set up, that's next on my list. It sounds like I had better complete a few months quickly and produce some reports before making a final comittment. MoneyWiz may still have a chance in me abbreviated demo period if they could get a demo out soon.

Have you had anyone from iBank reply to requests on these simple accounting concerns?

A suggestion adding to ShariPotter's posting. For those still looking for financial software, set reminders in your calendar and download transactions in a QFX file every month or so to archive for when the unthinkable happens, and you finally find a software package you like. This saved me a lot of manual entry. I got in this habit 15 years ago with Quicken. I ended up re-entering data because of corrupt database and corrupt backups so often (about every 16 months) it became the only way to really back up anything I could trust to work.

I posted several messages in their support community and the essence of their response was, "Put in the correct dates and it will work."

They just simply don't seem to have a clue about what a reconciliation actually is. They seem to want to equate it with a paper-like account statement. Anyone who knows what reconciling accounts entails knows the two are distinctly different (though complimentary) animals.

I really do want to like iBank, though maybe that's a bit like salivating over dirty water in a desert. Sadly, it seems to be the best I can do right now. They could easily OWN the Mac financial software market --- and I mean monopolisticly DOMINATE it --- if they would just fix a few critical flaws.