I just realized that I’m about to stop using the most stable piece of
Microsoft software I’ve ever encountered. For a while now I’ve been
meaning to update to new personal finance software, but I’ve been
putting it off because it’s been difficult to find something that
does everything I want. When I started thinking about this I came up
with the following 2 criteria, which I think will apply more
generally to most of my software selections in the future, and a 3rd
specific to personal finance programs:

1) Must support open standards whenever possible. Duh - to make it as
easy as possible to import/export/backup/whatever important data, and
use it in multiple programs if necessary.
2) Have some cross-platform support. This usually arises out of (1),
but it’s extra nice if the same program load the same data file on
different platforms.
and
3) Not Quicken, mostly because of reason (1). I actually tried to
switch to Quicken about 6 months ago and it was a disaster. I don’t
remember all the details, but the main problem was that my old
program would only export QIF files (that’s Quicken Interchange
Format, btw), and as of the latest version of Quicken they decided to
disallow the importing of QIF files. What morons. I realize that it’s
an obsolete format, but I have 10 years of transactions in several
accounts, and I’m sorry but I’m not going to throw those out. I think
there was a workaround where you could import into one account type,
then switch it to another account type, but that seemed like a
loophole unlikely to persist in the next version. In reading about
this issue I came across another problem with importing OFC files; I
don’t remember the details but it had something to do with not
allowing import of local files. Actually I think I tried to export
OFC from my old program but quicken wouldn’t do that either, now that
I think about it.
Although I was originally attracted to quicken because there were
both Mac & PC versions, they weren’t really in parallel, and I don’t
know if you could even open the same file in both. In any case you
actually had to buy 2 versions of the program to run on those
platforms. And Linux? Not.
Subsequently I decided that this was a company who didn’t value ease
of use for users, that was offering a personal finance program that
wouldn’t read my personal finance data, so wasn’t really to be
trusted with something this important.

I think I tried the latest version of Microsoft Money, too, but don’t
remember the problems there. I do recall it wouldn’t directly import
my current file.

I finally stumbled on this program called Moneydance. It’s written in
Java, so multiplatform is built in, including future platforms,
right? (Oh except this MacIntel thing, which won’t run Java yet…
sheesh… good thing I can’t afford a new laptop right now…) .I
was a bit skeptical because it’s a small time operation, but I think
it will be our new program for a while.

I have to say that importing worked really well… so well… I had
envisioned a potential nightmare with duplicate transfer
transactions, and problems with syncing manually entered vs.
downloaded transactions, but this worked perfectly. It was a bit
labor intensive in that I had to export each account as a separate
QIF file (maybe this is a limitation of QIF, or my old program, I
don’t know) and make sure the account was created in Moneydance
before importing, but wow, everything made it into the correct
account, no transactions were duplicated (not one). I then hooked up
online banking where possible, and brought all accounts up to date
through some combination of directly downloading into Moneydance or
downloading to files from the banks, and wham! - all account balances
matched up perfectly. It was ridiculous, honestly.

Now I have to say I’m going to miss some features - Moneydance is
still young, and doesn’t have what you might think are some pretty
basic abilities (select groups of transactions and change account or
category, for example; automatically replace the cryptic memos from
bank downloads with human readable labels, for another; budget/
balance forecasting). Hopefully these will appear soon, either in new
versions or as ‘extensions’ to the main program. If not it is simple
to export your entire file to XML, do some fancy under the hood text
processing, and return the file to moneydance, in Mac, Linux,
Windows, whatever (Mostly Mac in our case). Use it as and excuse to
learn to use sed and regular expressions, as I’ve had to do for some
changes.

So it’s goodbye to Microsoft Money 98, which we’ve been using for
however many years now… that probably came out in 97, so 9 years,
and it did everything we needed it to. I still remember being
reluctant to switch from Money 95 to 98 - the 95 install was around
12MB, and the 98 install was around 100MB (BLOATED). This is a
program that adds and subtracts. WTF do you do with 100MB? Anyway,
Moneydance is around 3MB. Much better. But anyway, if it hadn’t been
the most stable Microsoft product I’ve ever seen there’s no way we
could have used it so long. I think I only started having trouble
when running it on a WinXPSP2 virtual machine running on VMWare4 on a
Linux host, and that would bring the whole virtual machine to a halt.
Even then, we never lost a single transaction - it would always seem
to recover gracefully.

I’ll probably keep it around in VirtualPC on my powerbook, but
otherwise it’s Moneydance for now…

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 30th, 2006 at 9:22 pm and is filed under Computer configuration, Mailed In. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.