Quicken faced competition shortly after its 1991 launch. One of those rivals was Moneydance, a free, open-source, desktop application released in 1998. Today, the personal finance app runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux, with a $49.99 price tag (after 100 free manual transactions). Moneydance offers much of the same functionality as Quicken, including income and expense management, online banking and bill pay, investment tracking, budgeting, and reports. It also supports multiple international currencies and cryptocurrencies.
That said, Moneydance lags behind Quicken Deluxe (the Editors’ Choice pick for paid personal finance services) due to a dated, sometimes clunky user interface and substandard mobile apps. By contrast, Mint (the Editors’ Choice pick for free personal finance services) bundles its budgeting and credit-reporting features into top-notch web and mobile apps. For those reasons, we can’t recommend Moneydance as wholeheartedly as those services, but you may find it worthwhile for its many useful tools.
Getting Started With Moneydance
Moneydance doesn’t offer much in the way of setup, but neither do its competitors. To get started, you connect your online financial accounts—checking and savings, credit card, investment, and loans. You can also specify the file that should open when you launch the app (Moneydance supports multiple files, which are sets of accounts belonging to different individuals), and see when you last logged in to all of them. If you have trouble understanding the site’s menu system and navigation structure, you can start or join a private or public discussion online and consult the software’s robust collection of how-to articles.
Importing Financial Data
Moneydance downloads account data from many major and minor financial institutions, though it didn’t support every one I tried. For most of these, you create the connections to your online banks by entering your username and password for each account. This involves following a simple set of steps. You create a new account, such as checking or credit cards, highlight it in the left vertical navigation bar, and select Set Up Online Banking from the Online menu. A wizard-like tool walks you through the process.
At the time of this writing, Moneydance was in the process of switching over from direct connections to financial institutions to connections via third-party providers. However, the new system hadn’t been implemented when I reviewed the software. As it stands at this writing, setting up online banking is similar to the process you employ to import Quicken or QuickBooks data from a bank. Moneydance walks you through the required steps, which involves going to the financial institution’s website and authorizing the connection, then returning to Moneydance to download the transactions.
This process worked fine, but creating the connection wasn’t as easy to do as it is on competing websites that already use third-party providers. On those sites, you simply enter your username and password. Account creation and transaction downloads are usually done automatically, with the authorization occurring behind the scenes, though you sometimes have to provide additional security information.
As you’re creating accounts, you can include quite a bit of detail in the window that opens, including start date, initial balance, account number, and routing number (if applicable). There’s also a field for an unusual option: Default Category. Moneydance doesn’t make categorization guesses like its competitors do. If you choose a default category, every transaction that comes in will have it designated as such. So, you must assign your categories to any transaction that doesn’t match the default. That said, the software learns as it goes, so similar transactions will be automatically categorized in the future.
Moneydance also lets you connect to your bank’s online bill pay system and authorize payments from within the software itself. Quicken Deluxe does not offer bill pay as a standard part of its service. Bill Manager is only available to users of Quicken Premier and Quicken Home & Business, so you must upgrade to use it. Mint supported bill pay for a while, but it no longer does. So, Moneydance is the only application we reviewed that supports online bill pay.
Using Moneydance
Moneydance doesn’t offer Credit Sesame‘s fresh, state-of-the-art user experience. It still uses standard Windows menus in addition to the sidebar, which shows your list of accounts and their balances. Below that, you see links to the software’s many graphs and reports. Quicken Deluxe offers many more, though, and both its reports and graphs look smoother and more elegant. They’re also more customizable. You can, though, memorize and run customized reports in both apps.
There are two additional links at the toolbar’s top. One takes you to Summary, which most personal finance serves call the dashboard. This overview highlights some of the most important numbers in your financial file—and it’s one of the best I’ve seen. All of your accounts are displayed in the left vertical pane, along with their balances. A table of common exchange rates sits below that; you can click a link to open a box that lets you set your base rate.
The right vertical pane contains reminders for overdue and upcoming bills. Underneath that is a calendar that displays the current month’s transaction reminders and general reminders, as well as a color-coded list of current expenses in text and graph form (you can change the date range for them). There’s also a section for updates and extensions. There, you can see whether you’re using the most recent Moneydance version. You can also see the list of extensions (add-ons) that work with Moneydance, such as Balance Predictor, PayPal Importer, and Debt Insights.
The Summary page is highly customizable. Click Preferences in the File menu, and options for adding, removing, and moving items appear in a new window. The Preferences window also offers settings for printing, backups, your network, and the software’s appearance. You have tremendous control over the application’s aesthetic. You can choose from six themes, and adjust fonts and colors for each one.
To create a new Transaction Reminder or General Reminder, you can either right-click a date to open a data entry window (Moneydance makes good use of local menus) or click the plus sign in the lower right corner. If you want to remind yourself to pay rent every first day of the month, for example, you open the Transaction Reminder window and enter the details of the expense.
Moneydance supports recurring reminders via a flexible scheduling tool. You can easily create daily, weekly, monthly, or annual calendar entries (on any day or every x weeks), and request advance notice a specified number of days before the actual reminder is supposed to occur. You can also define reminders from account registers. To do so, you simply right-click a transaction and select Create Reminder from Transaction in the menu of options to open the Transaction Reminder screen. This method creates a reminder with an entry’s details; you don’t need to manually fill it out.
Your Registers
When you click an account name in the sidebar, the register for that account opens in the middle of the screen. Moneydance’s registers resemble paper checkbook registers, though they’re not as elegant looking as those some competitors have designed. Click a recently downloaded transaction, and a small box opens in the upper-right corner containing its date, description, category, and amount. You can edit the description to make the bank text more understandable. You can also change the category, though if you need to create a new one, you must back out to the Tools menu to do so.
There’s more you can do with individual transactions in the register. Right-click one, and a local menu opens displaying your many options. For example, you can add an attachment; duplicate it; or mark it as uncleared, cleared, or reconciling. If you need to edit one or a group of transactions, the Batch Change option in the transaction menu lets you make changes to individual fields.
There are some other options here, such as single-line vs two-line mode (which lets you specify tags in addition to categories), delete, and sort by filters, but the really unusual one reads Show Other Side. Accounting websites, for the most part, try to steer clear of the nuts and bolts of double-entry accounting, so I was surprised to see a reference to debits and credits. It’s nothing the average user needs to know, but it’s there if for some reason you want to see it. Only Quicken Deluxe offers comparable transaction management, though CountAbout is good, too.
Capable Investment Tracking
Quicken Deluxe and Moneydance are fairly evenly matched when it comes to investment tracking. Moneydance lets you create multiple investment accounts, set up securities (stocks, bonds, and mutual funds), and record your holdings for each. The software can download market prices from multiple online sources to keep your portfolio updated, and it handles stock splits and cost basis calculations capably. Once you entered all the required data, you can view your investments in any of four different views: portfolio, investment register, bank register, and securities detail.
This last view is the one you’ll probably consult most frequently. You can add, edit, and remove securities, see their histories, and record stock splits. There’s also a price graph here. I’m a little surprised that there isn’t a link here to additional investment graphs and reports; you must visit the sidebar to access them. They include Asset Allocation, Investment Performance, and Capital Gains.
Budgeting Tools
Moneydance’s Budget Manager lets you create budgets of varying frequencies. One, Mixed Intervals, is a powerful, flexible budget type that lets you set your own start and end dates, and create each budget item on its own repeating interval. It also displays a color-coded graph to let you quickly gauge your budget adherence.
Anyone who’s ever worked on a budget will be more familiar with budgets that include only one time interval: Weekly, Biweekly, Monthly, and Annually. When you create a new standard budget, a sizeable table opens with income and expense types already labeled. This list is more comprehensive than what you’ll find in most competitors’ budgets. It’s so comprehensive, in fact, that it can be unwieldy. You can, though, edit the category list to meet your specific needs, and the budget changes to reflect your modifications. You can also click the Budgeted tab to see only rows that have numbers in them.
The Budget Manager is easy enough to use. You enter your projected budget amounts next to any income or expense items that apply to your situation, such as Salary, Bills, and Healthcare. Because these labeled rows match the software’s categories, Moneydance enters a number in the correct row every time you enter a transaction that uses a specific category. So, you can see at a glance how you’re doing as you go through the budget period. You can also run the Budget report, which compares budgeted expenses to actual expenses and shows the difference.
Once you’ve completed one budget period, you have three options for creating the next period’s budget: Copy and rollover previous period; Copy previous period; or Use actual spending from previous period. Quicken Deluxe offers more flexible budget tools, including the option to view your budget as a color-coded graph. It’s easier to use, and much more aesthetically pleasing, like most of Quicken’s features are in comparison to Moneydance’s features.
Unusual Mobile Setup
Moneydance has Android and iOS apps, but they’ve only seen minor tweaks since my last review. All you can do is view and edit your transaction registers, and manually add new transactions. Additionally, setup is a two-step process. You must first do a one-time sync that moves your Moneydance file from desktop to mobile using a syncing service like Dropbox. It can be a confusing process if you’ve never worked with shared folders before, but the help files are a strong assist. The sync is only needed during setup, but no other personal finance service we’ve tested requires that. Plus, rival services, such as Credit Karma and Simplifi, have apps that feature superior features and interfaces.
On the other hand, this use of a shared folder as a go-between means you could share your Moneydance file with other users, no matter the operating system they use. That’s unique in this group of personal finance solutions.
A Capable Old Timer
Moneydance is closer to Quicken Deluxe than any other competitor that we’ve reviewed. It’s also the oldest surviving personal finance service next to Quicken. That maturity is on display in its transaction management, investment tracking, online bill pay, and other useful features.
Still, Quicken Deluxe is stronger in several areas, including budgeting, reports, and planning. It also offers a service that lets you use the cloud to set up a connection to a password-protected website where you can view much of your Quicken data and enter transactions. Plus, Quicken’s user experience is far superior to what Moneydance offers.
Unless you need Moneydance’s support for multiple currencies and online bill pay, we recommend taking a look at Quicken Deluxe or Mint, our Editors’ Choice recommendations for paid and free personal finance apps, respectively.
For more on personal finance, check out Get Organized: How to Take Control of Your Personal Finances and Raising Saving-Savvy Kids: How to Talk to Your Children About Money.
