GEODUCK  I tried Moneydance when it first came out a few years ago. It was to slow to use and I went back to begrudgingly using Quicken for Mac.

Now that Quicken for Mac has totally degenerated, I am testing out Mac alternatives.

This latest version of Moneydance is an improvement on the original, but it has a long ways to go for serving as a usable application. I don't recommend it.

Personal finance applications should not be so difficult to design. The basic application model, Quicken, has been around for decades. Yet nobody can pull off anything functional and easy to use. Moneydance fails because its interface fails to accommodate typical working scenarios. The idea of these tools is to speed up the drudgery of maintaining all this data. Moneydance makes it harder.

A few examples, I have a few credit card accounts, a checking account, a savings account, some investment accounts--pretty typical stuff for a middle aged middle class American. Yet Moneydance cannot remember categories and predictive data for transactions from one account to another. So the user has to go through too many redundant behaviors for each account.

Even worse, making changes to a transaction item is remarkably difficult. I download checking account data, but have to manually assign categories. In Quicken I would just have to click in the category field and type in the first few letters and the predictive text completes the field. Easy and old technology.

Moneydance requires you to right click and find some obscure tech command called batch changes, and then further select the type of change you desire--category. Then a separate window pops up, but all you see are two opposing scroll arrows which you have to press and then choose the category from a long list. To do this for each transaction is nuts. Quicken solved this around 1992.

Another problem: Moneydance could not properly assign a translated data file from the bank to the proper credit card account. The choice was not in the picklist. I had to create a whole new account. That's

too much hassle.

This application is not ready for prime time.  
(Version 2008r3)