More money stuff

[prog]

I wish it were otherwise, but after a few weeks of trial it looks like I'm going to keep Quicken as my financial software of choice for now. This is my third pentannual attempt to use Quicken, but it's the first time that I've been able to have it update all my numbers from all my banks and cards and investments over the Internet.

It turns out that this is a dealmaker; while I still have to go in and categorize everything and make sure there are no duplicates, I love knowing that I'm not missing or mis-entering any numbers. And I definitely prefer this method to hand-entering purchases and deposits and such into the register, as I did in the past. That was always fun for a little while, but as soon as the novelty wore off I would stop using Quicken - and tracking my money - entirely for another four or five years. So that's no longer a danger.

The runner-up is an indie application called iBank, an attempt to do everything Quicken can, except with a much better Mac UI. Sadly, it can't yet connect to banks over the Internet. As soon as it can, I'm running right to it.

...of course as soon as I type this I'm wondering if I'm letting bad-laziness trump good-laziness, and if downloading and importing QIFs of all my accounts for iBank to use would be that much harder. But the likely answer is: yes, it's just inconvenient enough that I'd end up getting way behind. Meh.

Comments

Snotty/impatient Mac user response

[prog.livejournal.com]

I looked at Gnucash. Or rather stared dumbly at it while it utterly failed to install or run in any meaningful way on my Mac. That's about all the time I had for it, sadly.

Re: Snotty/impatient Mac user response

[taskboy3000.livejournal.com]

The trouble with gnucash is that it's a real double-entry accounting system. You need to learn how to do basic accounting, which was a challenge for me. My brother, who has a degree in finance, helped me out a good deal.

After investing that time to learn the system, I've never regretted leaving Quicken behind. I feel like I understand a lot better where my money is going.