Personal accounting software for the Mac

[tribpot]

I've been tracking my accounts and doing some very basic forecasting using Excel (my banks doesn't offer download facilities so I just c+p the screen into Excel). Having used MS Money many years ago on a PC, and wanting to do some proper budgeting, I bought a copy of Home Accountz for my Macbook.

Oh my - surely the ugliest user interface I have seen ( outside work) in a long time ... and no way to multi-select transactions (I've been test-loading from my spreadsheet) to delete them ... I can't get on with this at all.

So I am now evaluating Liquid Ledger and that seems a lot better but still not brilliantly intuitive to assign things to categories - and of course there are many, many categories and no way to group these together. It also falls over when importing csvs so I have a routine to output my Excel stuff as .qif.

I also downloaded MoneyWell, as I quite liked the idea of 'bucket' or envelope budgeting that it suggested, and it has iPhone integration as well. But another cluttered and unintuitive UI, and it seems to save changes without reflecting them back on the screen unless you click in several places to force it to refresh, very odd.

I'm going to evaluate YNAB as well I suspect, but did anyone have any recommendations based on what I've written so far? Unless I have rose-tinted specs on, none of them seem a patch on MS Money.

I've never actively used budgeting on Moneydance (the mere act of recording transactions seems to be enough to keep me on the straight and narrow).

But from having a bit of a play it seems to be able to set you off by getting an average amount of all your categories and then allow you to edit them.

It does also allow you to import .csv and .qif files (there is an auto-link feature to online banks but I think this only works with US banks)

I think the 100-transaction limit is there to let you have a go with sample data. I think you can import data with more records - it just won't then allow you to manually add/edit.

OK, well I've finally tried YNAB now and I'm pretty sold on it. More than anything I'm looking for a budgeting tool, and something that keeps reasonable track of where my money actually goes (mostly on chocolate), and it seems to fit the bill well. I also have quite a few reservations about iBank's stability as a product. I think it's a case of adding features quickly and not being too good at patching what they have already, but there also seem to be some glaring omissions in the functionality. It might be one to watch in future.

Unfortunately, I've been away from the thread for a few days and missed the talk about Moneydance so I might have to give that a look now also! But for now I'd say YNAB is a winner for me.

Bitclueless, there's also an article about switching from Windows to Mac OS here and this book looks OK (previous editions have been well reviewed and I bought a friend an iPhone one in the same series that she really likes). I have to confess I've been using a Mac since the eighties so I'm fairly used to them by now.

tribpot, I'm not a developer either (network security consultant) but I do work with them often and there seemed to be a lot of agreement that these products are definitely designed to solve different problems (one of them also recommended YNAB). You're right, it's not great when a review tries to compare such dissimilar products and pick a 'winner'.

Oberon - hurrah, I'm glad you like YNAB too. How have you found the iPhone sync? It's not the slickest thing in the world but it works okay.

Would be great to get your view on Moneydance; I think I'm pretty much sold on YNAB because it so specifically is about budgeting rather than account tracking.

Just reviving this thread to post a round-up of Mac apps. The absence of YNAB has been noted by YNAB. Personally I think this thread is a more comprehensive piece of reviewing but then I would say that, wouldn't I?