Bottom Line
Moneydance is an ideal desktop personal finance platform with online bill pay, excellent security, and supports various currencies.
Unfortunately, it has a mobile app version limited to some of the features available on the desktop version.
This makes it challenging for Moneydance to compete with other top personal finance software.
The Pros:
- Reasonable pricing
- Supports multiple currencies
- Includes online investment and tracking tools
- Fast with a detailed and user-friendly dashboard
The Cons:
- Weak mobile application
- It may be challenging to connect some financial accounts
Seven years after its launch in 1991, Quicken started to receive competition from a free, open-source app known as Moneydance.
It offers most of Quickens’s functionalities, including online banking and bill pay, income and expense management, budgeting, investment tracking, and reports.
Over the years, Moneydance has developed and now runs on Mac, Windows, and Linus, with a one-time price tag after making 100 free manual transactions.
What Is Moneydance?
Moneydance is a budgeting platform much similar to Quicken, but unlike Quicken that has a monthly charge, Moneydance goes for a one-time fee of $49.99.
The platform looks like a ledger and allows you to monitor your banking and investment accounts provided you link them.
You can also use Moneydance to pay bills as well as handle different currencies directly.
Features Of Moneydance
Moneydance is a massive platform where you can create one universe for all your finances. It provides excellent functions due to the following features:
Online Banking
Almost every bank now offers online banking, but it is not easy to manage when you have two or more accounts in one bank.
Moneydance online banking can help you manage several accounts from multiple banks and monitor them in one dashboard.
The platform also automatically downloads your transactions and categorizes them to help you track your expenses.
Bill Reminders And Pay
Despite budgeting apps tracking your finances and set money goals, you still need the bank app to schedule recurring and single online bill payments.
However:
Moneydance allows you to make payments directly from its platform using Direct Connect – a similar program to the one used in Quickbooks and Quicken.
Moneydance Summary
The platform aggregates your account data and provides the following details on the dashboard for easy navigation:
- Account balances
- Foreign exchange rate information
- Payment reminders
- Upcoming and overdue transactions
Everything may be summarized on one page, but you can choose an item from the drop-down list and directly open an account to enter or reconcile transactions.
Transaction Categorization
Through Moneydance, you can set specific budgets by category; for example, you can set a budget for restaurant expenses only.
It also allows you to assign tags that are crucial when running reports and analyzing your spending trends.
For example, you can tag all your expenses while on a road trip and then pull reports to see exactly how much your road trip was.
Budgeting Reports
The platform also allows you to generate in-depth budgeting analysis reports that make it easy for you to track your personal or business figures.
The potential budget reports you can compile are:
- Cash flow
- Transfers
- Budget performance
- Account balances
- Income and expenses
- Reconciling transactions
Graphing Tool
Moneydance has graphing tools that allow you to generate visual data and reports of your income and expenses.
Best of all:
You can adjust to create the type of graph you want and customize it with the desired dates and any other parameters you wish.
Some of the graphs you can generate using Moneydance include:
- Asset allocation for investments
- Net worth
- Account balances
- Memorized graphs
- Income and expenses
Account Registers
It is where you can enter transactions, delete transactions, or make any necessary edits.
The Accounts Registers is set up like traditional checkbooks that automatically calculate your balances and sorts out your transactions.
It also allows auto-complete for recurring transactions to save on time.
Investment Tracking
Unlike most budgeting apps that do not offer investment tracking tools, Moneydance enables users to follow their investments by updating the total value of one’s portfolios.
It also provides the performance of individual securities where you can track mutual funds, bonds, stocks, certificates of deposits, and probably any type of investment.
And if that’s not enough:
You can customize investment tracking by setting it for an automatic daily download of security prices.
Foreign Currency Transactions
If you have a foreign bank account or frequently do any foreign currency transactions, you will find this feature extremely beneficial.
Moneydance supports multiple currencies and can automatically convert from one currency to another.
The platform performs everything automatically, and therefore, you don’t need a calculator and to look up daily exchange rates.
How Can Moneydance Be Improved?
Moneydance Mobile App
The biggest downfall of Moneydance is its mobile app, which does not support the platform’s full functionality.
On the other hand:
The Moneydance desktop app offers you the best of the software.
The mobile app is free for download for both Android and iOS users. However, it is a mere companion for the desktop to enter and modify transactions solely.
Moneydance Customer Support
For efficient customer support, an organization should provide phone and email support to its customers.
If you need help with Moneydance, you will need to fill out a request and wait for a member of the Moneydance support team or an experienced user to respond to your question.
The other way to get help with Moneydance is to go through old articles and forums on the website. You can use the search function to look for anything specific.
Moneydance vs. Quicken
Conclusion
When considering the popular persona finance management software, Moneydance offers some excellent competition to most of them.
It is especially getting more users due to its surprising one-time purchase while offering powerful and efficient features.
However, it has a somewhat traditional user interface that may not appeal to the current young generation.
