OSX Finance Software Revisited: iBank versus Moneywell

For the time being, iBank has won my personal contest for OSX financial software. I was beta testing Financial Life for Mac, but the beta expired, and a popup box popped up saying, "check for updates, otherwise there is a new version available on the web," or something like that. The "check for updates" menu item, however, was grayed out. When you close the popup menu, the beta closes as well, so you are unable to check for updates. That's no way to treat a beta tester, even if its just some insignificant, carfree, beekeeping blogger. On top of that, Quicken pushed the release date back again, from this summer to this Fall. Enough is enough. My Quicken for Mac 2007, for some reason, also quit downloading my credit card spending information. I kept getting an error message. With the online feature on the old Quicken becoming crippled, I forked over the $60 for iBank. Financial software has really helped keep our finances in balance. The expense, to me, is worth it.

iBank works well, and it connects to the iPod Touch, right now through a web app connected to Mobile Me, but they've submitted an iPod Touch/iPhone app to Apple. Once that is out, you can use you iPod Touch to record your expenses even when you are not connected to the internet. That shouldn't be an issue with the iPhone, except that it sounds like AT&T has a few holes in their coverage area.

The software, however, is not perfect. Most of my complaints pertain to the aesthetics. There is an annoying animated rolling-into-place with the charts. (I don't know why it annoys me -- it might be because the jerky rendering makes me worry about the stability of the program -- but it does). Reports are hard to get to, (you access them through charts), and you can't specify time periods for your reports. All reports are in a standard twelve month format. And the graphics are just clunky. The income/expense graph, that you access by clicking on the "through time" button on the chart is made up of very thick bars that abut each other. With the current release, they placed the expense bar on the bottom of the graph, so you can no longer tell, at a glance, if your income is keeping ahead of your expenses. The charts just split down into smaller and smaller slices. In Quicken for Mac, clicking on "other" brings up another chart. In iBank, it just reveals smaller slices, so you can't really tell what those slices are. That makes the chart seem more like an inconsiderately designed afterthought. It's not really useful for looking at your spending in your smaller categories.

The budgeting feature in iBank is also very rudimentary. You can't plan for changes during the year to your monthly expenditures. (Our utilities vary from $25 a month in the summer to around $100 a month in the winter). And two months out of the year, there is an extra pay period. You can designate income as "every two weeks," but it just gives you a higher average monthly amount. It's basic, and a little bit annoying because of that.

Other small things that annoy me keep cropping up. You can't perform calculations in the amount field. There's no calendar view. You can set the program to backup the database automatically, but only at startup, and it ties up the software for a couple of minutes. It would make more sense to me to backup the database at shutdown -- then your changes would be automatically backed up. There's also the fact there is no "restore" command that I can find. It looks like you have to manually retrieve and unzip the database from Mobile Me. To have a backup but not a restore command just seems sloppy to me. I keep reading that reconciling is more of a chore than in other programs. I haven't reconciled an account, so I can't report on that.

So my positive review for iBank boils down to this: It works. It downloads transactions the way it should. It allows you to enter transactions on an iPod Touch and synchronize them with your computer.

Do I enjoy using iBank, (all questions about the sanity of enjoying financial software aside). No, I can't say that I do right now. A large part of the blame falls on the program's poor visual design, but as noted, there are small functional issues that might possibly be addressed in future releases. I don't know if the aesthetics will ever improve. I imagine it looks the way the software writer wants it to look, and I am sure it is beautiful to him. I recommend they hire a designer. Hey, maybe I could make a living as a software aesthetics consultant!

Close on the heels of iBank, and possibly overtaking it for me, is MoneyWell. I'm running the test version right now. They claim to be working on an iPod Touch/iPhone app, but I haven't tracked down when they expect to release it.

Moneywell is much nicer, to me, visually. It's also focussed around budgeting, replicating the renowned envelope system. In MoneyWell's case, your categories are represented as virtual buckets on the left side of the screen. You allocate your budgeted amounts to those buckets, and when your income comes in, it flows into the buckets. You can see, at a glance, when you open the program, how much money you have left to spend in your buckets per category. That, to me, is the main reason I use financial software. The fact the bucket tips over if you empty it out seems a little cutesy, but it's in a way I enjoy but would never admit in public. Yes, this is financial software that's fun! The amount in your bucket also automatically carries forward to the next month, and you can reallocate amount the buckets if you have a bigger expense in one area. (You could send money from the savings bucket to the financial software bucket, for example, if you have a tendency not to remain faithful to one brand of software). You can also specify different amounts for different months.

The report function still seems a little rudimentary -- it goes straight to printing but you can, of course, choose a PDF preview rather than to print -- but at least the "report" button is right there on the toolbar and not buried in charts as it is in iBank, and you can specify a date range.

Beyond that, I haven't used MoneyWell much. I have seen some reviews that say they don't handle investment accounts well, but "investment" is a choice in the account setup. If I explore further, I'll report back. (I checked. It doesn't seem to support Portfolios. You can enter a dollar amount in a retirement account, but you can't keep track of shares owned and share prices).

I keep returning back to the question of how I use financial software. At a certain point, the number of categories you have begins to eclipse the usefulness of having categories. At the simplest level, is splitting everything into wants, needs, and savings. I keep tending toward a minute accounting. Accounting for Laura's paycheck falls into this tendency. I itemize all the payroll deductions, though that information is not important -- state tax, federal tax, medicare, worker's comp, etc. They're all consistent amounts that we have no control over, and they appear on the W-2 at the end of the year. "Why," I ask myself, "don't I just enter the amount of take home pay as salary?" That would work for the purposes of banking and budget keeping, but I have some strange inner compulsion to have our banking software match the pay stub. The same type of debate rages for me as to whether I need to include our retirement accounts in my financial software. It's not money we use. I can watch the value go up and down, but I can't do much about it. But since I track the money going from the paycheck, I also need to track the mutual fund purchases, and so on. While I have a complete financial picture, down to a very detailed level, I also spend a lot of time at it. It feels good to keep all the details straight, but I wish, at the same time, I could keep it simpler. MoneyWell has a Mortgage/Rent bucket as a default. When I pay the mortgage, I don't think "I'm writing a check for principal, interest, and escrow," I think "I'm paying the mortgage." But I keep track of the details. I track the escrow account. I track the taxes and insurance paid out of escrow. I make sure I have the mortgage interest entered correctly every month. I wish I could just lighten up and lump it all in one bucket.

It would be nice, with future releases of MoneyWell, to have a deeper layer of minute information, (Taxes:state, Taxes:federal, Self Employment:Beekeeping:Bee Removal, Self Employment:Beekeeping:Honey Sales, etc) that would appear in the bucket list in simpler buckets, (Taxes, Self Employment, etc.). Right now, my impression is that MoneyWell is a simpler financial software package, and my impression may be a wrong one from the small amount of time I've spent with the program. Particularly, as someone who is tracking small business income and expenses I want a detailed level of accounting, but I would like the surface appearance to remain more simple.

For now, I'll keep using iBank, but I'm going to continue testing MoneyWell. It might ultimately serve my needs better. It certainly is nicer to look at, and performs the important job of budgeting infinitely better.

Quicken, I'm abandoning as a matter of principle.