Mac finance software comparison - where does iBank rate?

[chuckbo]

I'm doing a comparison of about a half-dozen Mac personal finance/budgeting applications, and I've downloaded your demo. But it'd speed things up if you can send a reply about which of these features your product supports.

Mandatory

- Running balance on accounts
- View transactions of categories (e.g. grocery purchases last month)
- Drill down from a total on a report to individual transaction list
- Split transactions among multiple categories
- Transfer entries between accounts (e.g. change the credit card it was charged to)
- Income statements
- Record monthly budget by category (variable amounts)
- Budget vs. Actual reports
- Forecast reports
- Search on payee
- Reconcile bank accounts
- Reconcile credit cards
- Reconcile stock portfolios
- Memorized transactions
- Move (drag & drop) transactions between accounts (correcting entries)
- Reports for given timeframe
- Import transactions (including split transactions) from Quicken
- Import stock prices from a 3rd party

Desirable

- View multiple categories/accounts simultaneously
- Cash flow reports & projections
- Clairvoyance (while doing data entry) - auto-completes payee name and remembers most recent category for that payee
- Import historical stock prices
- Enter monthly forecast by category (multiple budget scenarios for the same time period)
- All reports can display budget or forecast.
- Report remaining budget for year or month
- Report remaining forecast for year or month
- Hide accounts/categories with 0 amounts (for the entire report’s period)
- Graph net worth over time
- Graph % breakdown of expenses/incomes by category (actual and budget)
- Project loan outstanding amount
- Provide for varying interest rates
- Provide for varying payments
- Assign budget items to specific liabilities (credit cards) — used for cash flow projections
- Scheduled transactions
- When entering a transaction, show amount spent vs budget for that category & month
- Chart stock prices
- Record planned transfers between accounts (for cash flow -- example move $5000 from savings account to IRA in March)

[flyingdesigner]

chuckbo -- I'll be following your post closely to see what you find out. It seems you have a rather robust set of needs (as do I) so I'm wondering what other applications you are looking at.

I'll be posting another thread about must haves for me to switch to iBank -- features that it doesn't have yet -- to see if the mods can pin a timeline down on them.

[chuckbo]

I'm comparing with MoneyDancer, iFinance, Money, Liquid Ledger, and Cha-Ching.
And there were a bunch of others that didn't even get into the final group.

Overall, I'm very disappointed. I'm no fan of Quicken because I'd like it to have better forecasting capabilities, but I see huge gaps in all of the others in basic functionality. I was about to buy iBank since I'd worked with it last Fall and gotten it to where it could import my Quicken transactions. But before I sent in my money, I decided to make a budget on Jan 1st, and I discovered that it falls short on the ability to set budget amounts by month. That totally surprised me. Maybe I've created too many budgets at work (and too many budget tracking programs), but none of the managers I ever rolled out an app to would've accepted something where they couldn't track a budget by month or where they had to assume that amounts are evenly distributed across the months. But that seems to where the others fall down, too. I don't know how iBank does with the cash flow forecasting either -- I hadn't gotten that far. I don't see how you can allocate/apportion an expense to an account, so you wouldn't be able to really do forecasting your bank balances or credit card balances into the future. Right now, I'm having to do all of this manually in Numbers or Excel, so I was hoping to find a program that might be able to do it. I guess I'm tempted to dust off the program I was working on except that my time is already mostly full with other projects.

[flyingdesigner]

Yes, its tricky: You'd think that iBank would be the best positioned to take up the slack from where Quicken left off. And since Quicken doesn't seem to think the Mac users market is one worth courting, there is a whole market share available to iBank if they'd just step up to the plate to increase the functionality to what savvy users of Quicken are used to.

I almost put my money down for iBank too, but then found that they don't have classes (which, to me, is essential). I don't use the budgeting feature of Q 2007 (yet). But I rely heavily on the Category/Class interface, the portfolio tracking, and the reporting. (I use 4 files currently 1 for personal accts, 1 for my joint accts with my wife -- so she can edit it as well -- and 2 for my businesses.)

If iBank would commit to a more robust feature set within the next 6 to 8 months, those of us who require that extra functionality could hold out for a bit and then pop over when its ready. If they don't, I hope somebody will see the market share and step in to fill it.

[wilsonjw]

I began looking at iBank as a Quicken alternative last summer and ran parallel for about 6 weeks before giving up on iBank. But when I revisited iBank last month I found that it now meets my needs. I've had to change a couple things about how I track my finances but I like these guys. They're the only real alternative and they are actively addressing user requests. And although they've got a ways to go, they're a lot further ahead than Quicken was when I first adopted it back in 1985.

[aka_jt]

In all fairness to iBank, it's really designed as a PERSONAL finance manager, not something to use in the work place. For something to use in the workplace, there are other packages available:, Quickbooks, etc.

[AMCarter3]

I am one of the MANY, MANY irate long-time Macintosh Quicken users (2007 for me) who are totally fed up with Intuit's lackluster, insulting way of ignoring our requests and pleas for parity with their Windows product. The Quicken Essentials 2010 product is a joke - it is flatout a major downgrade from 2007. You all probably know this.

I've been following the iBank's progress for over a year. Same for MoneyDance. And I've checked out a few others. So far, none of them knocked my socks off compared to Quicken 2007. iBank is a top contender for sure, but so is MoneyDance, and Fortora. None to them are the ideal alternative to Quicken... YET!

I'd really like to hear directly from the iBank developer... What is your interest, passion and strategy for capturing the Mac market? Do you aspire to gain real market share? Are you interested in our business enough to share your vision for iBank with us? Let us hear what your basic plans are for improving iBank. Sell us on the superiority of iBank over any other "Mac" finance program (aka: user interface, investment transactions, bill pay, accessing a WIDE range of banks & institutions, custom reports, etc.

[chuckbo]

But aka_it,

that's how I'm evaluating it ... as a personal financial planning tool, not as a business.
The main things I need are in an app:
...(1) act like a Mac app and be easy to use;
...(2) enter transactions (easily) so I can track where I'm spending money;
...(3) let me create monthly budgets at the beginning of the year so I can set guidelines on where to spend money, what I can afford;
...(4) as I go through a month, help me track where I am and what I have left to spend by category;
...(5) help me reconcile accounts (but I don't want bank transactions to generate transactions because I've had too many cases where the bank or credit card companies have been wrong and I only discovered the error as I went through the monthly statement);
...(6) provide a tool to forecast my cash flow so I can decide if I can afford to buy an item or move money to a retirement fund.

I feel like iBank does the first two better than any of the other tools I've been following. It doesn't do 3 or 6 at all. I haven't tried #5. It could do #4 extremely well by putting a live graph of actual vs budget for a month into the graphing area, but it doesn't do that yet (since it doesn't provide monthly budgeting yet).

Chuck

[AMCarter3]

Check out Rob Pickering's review of iBank (just posted on his blog a few days ago). Very good review.

Mac

[AMCarter3]

Sorry, forgot to include the link for Rob's iBank review:
http://robpickering.com/technology/2010 ... ative.html

Mac

[Jason Staloff]

Thanks, that's a pretty nice review, though by the author's admission he didn't have time to go into some of the areas chuckbo is asking about.

The majority of those features are present in iBank, so I'll focus on the ones that merit further explanation. By way of preface, I want to point out that we're putting a major emphasis on improvements to the reporting and budgetting facilities in the next major version. You may want to take a look over at our developer's blog to learn more about what's coming up the pike.

Drill-down from charts/reports to transactions is a long standing feature request, it's under consideration, and the same can be said for budgets that vary by month. You can't currently drag and drop transactions between accounts, but you can copy/cut/paste.

Presently, all security pricing information we download automatically comes from Yahoo Finance, though it is also possible to make manual entries in the Portfolio for any instruments that aren't listed on Yahoo.

Smart accounts and Portfolios make it easy to view the contents of multiple accounts simultaneously, and our dynamic charts with adjustable account scopes contribute to that flexibility.

With this as an overview on your initial list of features, I'm hoping you'll take the iBank trial and manual in hand, work with your data, and let us know how it goes for you.

As to future features, the nature of software development precludes making specific statements in advance; please know that we're listening carefully to your requests and we're striving to extend our product in ways that make the most difference to our users.

A note on Quicken classes: we do import them, albeit as subcategories, and there is a standing feature request for adding a class hierarchy to iBank. Meanwhile, you may find that account groups and smart accounts, along with nested categories, help you to build comparable functionality.

Chuckbo, have you looked at our forecasts feature? We can predict future account balances based on previous expenditures, scheduled transactions, or both.

Also, please do look at our reconciliation setup. I think iBank does a good job with this. You build an electronic statement to match your paper statement by dragging transactions into it from your register. This is a quick process that reveals any discrepancies, and you get an electronic record that's easy to go back to later.

[chuckbo]

Jason,

I decided to visit your forum today to see if there's any announcements about iBank for the iPad ... and I found your reply to my note! Nice timing.

I think I've posted this already. I played a lot with iBank last summer and had decided to purchase it at the year end so I could start with a fresh budget year. Then right before I bought it, I tried the budgeting and discovered that that isn't your focus. That's grown even more important to me now that I'm teaching Dave Ramsey seminars; I have to have a financial app that lets me track my budget.

Let me add some comments and observations, please.
1) I emphatically believe that iBank is the very best financial program out there for entering data -- and I've tried all of them out more than once. You do all of the things that I was putting into the program I was working on for awhile (and you do them the right way).
2) I think iBank is good at analyzing those transactions -- analyzing how you're spending your money and tracking it over time. There's nothing I prefer.
3) When I played with the forecasting, the little I did, was kind of clunky, and I think its limited because it doesn't have a good budgeting program to integrate with.
4) I ran into a new financial app back in Feb that I hadn't seen before: Cashculator. I'm really impressed that they have the right vision for forecasting: they use the budget to project into the future and use the past for actuals. One thing that makes it unusable for me, though, is that they don't work at the transaction-level.
5) Still on Cashculator, I had three pieces of advice for them, and it seems like good advice for iBank, too.
a) I encouraged to think bigger for their forecaster, to make it a real cash-flow forecaster. To do so, they would need to expand their model to deal with multiple accounts and tie payments for specific liabilities and expenses to specific assets. They said they had considered doing all that but felt it made things too complicated. Even so, they seem to have the best model, to me, for forecasting.
b) I suggested that they add more forecasting methods into the toolbox. So they allow you to copy the last 12 months from actual to plan or copy the average of the last 12 months to your plan. I'd like to see choices like take a forecast (perhaps last year's total + 5%) and distribute it over the next 12 months matching the actual distribution of the past 12 months. I did some techniques like that back in Excel a long time ago, and I've wanted it in a personal finance program ever since.

c) Here's the biggie. Since Cashculator does forecasting (and budgeting into future) so exceptionally well but doesn't have a way to enter transactions, and since iBank has the best interface and model for entering transactions but doesn't do budgeting or forecasting based on a budget, my advice to Cashculator's team was that they integrate with iBank and make it so they can import transactions -- or even read from your database directly. Now I'll make the same suggestion to you but the other way around. If that hasn't been your focus for iBank 4 or where you're spending your resources, look at Cashculator and see if you agree with me -- and you might look for a way to integrate the strengths of each and have a nice partnership.

Chuck

[Jason Staloff]

Hi Chuck,

Thanks, all very interesting. We do have a standing feature request in our request tracking system for using budgets as an input to forecasting, and I've made some notes for our development team about your reference to Cashculator.

[pacdunes]

Jason,
can you please point me to a guide (or FAQ/tutorials) that does a good job of explaining the different on-screen function buttons and reporting, in the budget and forecasting sections? I am finding information displayed but having a hard interpreting what I see. I guess I am finding that the user guide covers only the basics of a topic. There seems to be a lot of "read between the lines" information that I'm finding hard to grasp. The only tutorial on your website is how to import files from quicken. Would be nice to go through a "how to setup a budget", "how to create a forecast", etc.

[Jason Staloff]

Our Quicken importing tutorial has been well received, and we're definitely considering putting out some others in the future. Right now, the best way is to start working with your data alongside the manual, then contact our support department for specific guidance. You can email us support@iggsoftware.com or visit the iBank Knowledge Base forum at viewforum.php?f=12.

If you don't have much of your own data entered yet, you may want to copy our Sample Data.ibank file to your hard drive from the disk image on which iBank is distributed. This file contains a few accounts and some transaction history you can use to build on as you explore various iBank features.