Personal Finance Managers

[pine man]

I first started using PFMs in the late 1990s when my bank sent me a CD to set it up on my 'steam driven' PC. This was later replaced with MS Money. I tried various programs after that ending up with Quicken in the early 2000s which I later dumped when they changed to subscription only.

As a Mac user of about 6/7 years my latest PFM was the, Mac only Banktivity, formerly iBank, which I was very pleased with but as a family with both PC and Mac I was always a bit concerned that if the Mac failed I would be stuffed.

Where is all this leading?

Well, I have been looking at cross platform PFMs with synchronisation and thought I would share my decision with others who might be looking at alternatives.

This isn't a sales pitch but, after trying many, I went for Moneyspire, Best personal finance software for money management & budgeting for 2020 - Mac & Windows. It has a very reasonable one-off price of $29.99 in the US at the moment and this includes synchronisation through their cloud and access to banks via Moneyspire Connect. I was able to easily import all my data from Banktivity and was set up and running in no time at all. I now have it installed on my iMac, my wife's PC and my iPhone all at no extra cost and synchronising perfectly.

Well worth a look.

 

[chscag]

Thanks for the tip. We do receive requests quite often regarding choosing a personal finance manager. Like yourself many folks who formerly used Quicken have given up on it; not only because they went to a subscription model, but also for their lack of good customer support.

 

[Randy B. Singer]

Thanks for the tip. We do receive requests quite often regarding choosing a personal finance manager. Like yourself many folks who formerly used Quicken have given up on it; not only because they went to a subscription model, but also for their lack of good customer support.

Yes, because so many people have been looking to switch away from Quicken, I created a Web site listing all of the accounting software for the Macintosh to facilitate their search:

Macintosh Accounting Software
Macintosh Accounting Software

It's interesting to hear that you really like Moneyspire, Peter. What do you like about it other than its cross-platform abilities? Is it good at importing your financial information from your bank? Is it good at importing your financial information from Quicken?

 

[pine man]

What do you like about it other than its cross-platform abilities?

Well, the need for cross platform capabilities certainly reduced the contenders for a replacement and nowadays I no longer actually use PFMs for importing from my bank. However the import from Banktivity as a QIF worked very well indeed and, unlike some of the others, removed the default caregories and replaced them with the ones I had set up in Banktivity rather than adding to them. Setting up reminders was equally straightforward and I found the whole program easy to understand and use.

I did have a query with the way of setting up one of my regular payments, which involves irregular amounts, and sent an email to Moneyspire Support. The reply was received the following day and resolved my query perfectly.

Most PFMs, nowadays, seem to follow similar principles but this one seemed more intuitive and the pricing was very good, without having to pay extra for additional devices, cloud access and bank connection.

So far, very good indeed.

Randy I clean forgot about your web site listings - could have saved me a lot of searching!

 

[Randy B. Singer]

Thanks Peter! I really appreciate the feedback. I'll pass it along to others.

If I make it through this epidemic alive I'm hoping to contact all of the developers of accounting software to ask them to contribute information to my Web site about their products, to make the site more useful.

At the very minimum, it would be good to know if a product is cross platform and/or multi-device, if it can import information from your bank, if it can export data in a standardized format, etc.

Thanks again!