Before we get to the meat of our Moneydance review, we want to help you understand why this software is so valuable. Some of you already understand the importance of keeping track of all the cash you make and spend. Some of you think that you keep good track of your cash because your mobile banking app tells you.
We all started out just like you, whether it was in our early childhood or—unfortunately—well into our millennial years. We wondered, “Why is there a need to manage our money? Isn’t it easier to just work as hard as you can and then let the fruits of all that effort materialize into great riches?” Well, we hate to break it to you, but that kind of thinking will eventually find you in financial ruin. You might think, “I’m great at my job, and I’m rolling in dough.” And we applaud that! But if you can’t manage your money, you’re going to lose everything you’ve worked so hard for.
So You Think You Can Moneydance?
Moneydance is a little-known piece of accounting software attempting valiantly to take on the big guys in the industry, like Quicken, Quickbooks (not located in this report), Mint, and YNAB. We feel it is necessary to mention Quickbooks because it is, essentially, the super-professional iteration of Quicken—even released by the same company as Quicken—and so Quickbooks is something you need to be aware of when considering various financial accounting and management software.
Since we’ve gotten Quickbooks out of the way, let’s talk more about our featured software, Moneydance. Because this Moneydance review wouldn’t be complete without at least mentioning how in the world this word came to be.
The name Moneydance stems from an old tradition (as software names often do). Perhaps you’ve heard of the Cakewalk software which similarly took its name from an old dancing tradition where people would walk around in a circle, and at the end, the winner got to eat the cake. Well, Moneydance similarly takes its name from an old Polish, Slavic, Ukranian, and Hungarian wedding tradition.
In this “Moneydance” tradition—of which there are many variations—at a wedding, the male guests pay money to dance with the bride. We’re not sure what you do for a living, but if you’re having trouble making money to account for with your Moneydance software, we suggest you move to one of the countries where they still do this and perhaps get a fund started with your wedding!
Image source: pixabay.com
Pricing
You should be able to acquire Moneydance for around $50.
How It Compares
We picked a few similar products available on the market to see how they compare in this more-than-comprehensive Moneydance review.
Moneydance Review
Image source: The Lux Authority
Ease of Use: 4 Out of 5 Stars
Moneydance is rather useful in the realm of compatibility with your bank. You can connect the software—with all the requisite safety features, of course—to the majority of U.S. banks. This way, you’re not going to miss out any payments that go through your bank’s debit card or anything direct-deposited to your bank from your employer. The software finds the transaction and brings it to your attention so you can approve it, or you can choose to have the software simply import all your bank transactions automatically. This means you’re spending less time looking up your payments and more time doing what you want to be doing.
Setup Time: 4 Out of 5 Stars
It’s going to take a bit of time to synch the software with your financial institutions and also to enter in your year’s financial entries. In other words, if you want to start off your accounting right, unless it’s January 1st, you’re going to want to enter in all your financial data for the year. However, if you have been doing accounting in another program, some import options are available.
Design Quality: 4 Out of 5 Stars
Moneydance functions well if you know how to use it. Like the better-known programs out there, the desktop version offers a home screen with a snapshot of your financial state including money owed on credit cards and balances in checking and savings accounts. Everything is all in one place, easy to look at, and easily accessible by date. Just click on the calendar date, month, and year, and your records are easy to find, providing they have been updated faithfully for that time period. Additionally, the program instantaneously makes sense of it all, giving you an idea of where your balance sheet stands at any given moment.
It doesn’t blow us out of the water, nor does it disappoint us in terms of basic functionality. It has more than enough power to keep you covered for all the basic purchases you’ll make, bills you’ll pay, and various income you will earn, and it organizes all of these in a decent, fairly easy-to-use interface.
With Moneydance, you also have the option of using a mobile app that connects to your computer-based version with a little help from Dropbox, which requires setting up a Dropbox account if you don’t have one already. Similar to the desktop version, the mobile app allows you to bring up all your accounts with the push of a button, and then you can drill down into each account as needed.
Customer Service:
Moneydance is offered by developer Infinite Kind, which—rather unkindly—tries very hard to steer you away from any form of phone support, often defaulting to a public support forum. That said, the interface is laid out well, so the tech staff’s hope is that you won’t need to talk with them very often.
Pros
Cons
For more information:
Quicken Review
Image source: Investor Junkie
As we mentioned, this article is a Moneydance review, but Quicken is definitely one of the programs that has served the personal bookkeeping software industry the longest, so we can’t leave it out here. Maybe you’ve heard of Quicken loans, and yes, they are related. Quicken Loans was actually purchased by Intuit, the company that makes the Quicken software, in December 1999. The relationship between Quicken Loans and the Quicken software has been synergistic for Intuit, because the software offers opportunities to take out a Quicken mortgage or loan.
Also very notable is Intuit’s other mammoth bookkeeping software, Quickbooks, which is not quite as user-friendly as Quicken. However, it includes heavy-duty accounting capabilities for running a business. The reason we keep mentioning it is because, ultimately, if you manage your finances correctly, you’ll want a heavy-lifting program like Quickbooks. And the transition from a smaller program isn’t always easy to translate if you’ve been trying to manage your small business by rolling all your assets, expenditures, expenses, etc. into one Quicken or Moneydance account.
That said, if you’re intent on limiting yourself to any one of these personal money management programs, Quicken isn’t a bad option as you can always opt to manage your books with more of a heavy-lifting business-oriented program like Quickbooks.
The bottom line for the purpose of our Moneydance review is that Quicken has long been—and continues to be—the standard in personal accounting. It has among the easiest transition to Quickbooks if you’re just beginning to separate your sole proprietor books from your other personal accounts.
Price:
Because Quicken is put out by Intuit, a gigantic company, Quicken’s economies of scale allow it to offer its software at extremely low rates. Grab the Deluxe 2019 version for just under $30, and the basic starter version runs even less.
We do have to warn you—and this is a big deal—that they want to keep charging you every year, which is why we bumped up the price rating to $$$ here, so you’re not surprised by the yearly renewal fee. We think it’s just a tad sleazy of Intuit. And really, we recommend going with their more capable Quickbooks, anyway. If you’re going to buy Quicken, skip the games and just jump to the more expensive Quickbooks to save yourself trouble down the line.
We believe if you get the desktop version of Quickbooks, they won’t shake you down every year by forcing you to upgrade the next year, whereas Quicken actually only licenses the software for a year. So, buying Quicken and getting your finances invested in the Quicken system could, ironically, be a poor financial judgement that will cost you every single year!
Ease of Use: 4 Out of 5 Stars
Again, if you’re new to computing your own books, as we presume you might be, all of these programs have a learning curve. None of them are going to be super-easy to work with. Quicken has been in the business for a very long time, however, and Intuit is such a big company that they can afford to keep up two distinctly different programs which serve overlapping functions.
We think they should merge the programs into one to make them more compatible. Overall, Quicken’s ease of use, from the layout to the accessibility of all your important financial data points, is on-par with the featured program in this Moneydance review.
Setup Time: 4 Out of 5 Stars
There are so many factors involved in the setup time of your new financial software, and Quicken is no exception. That’s because your finances are important. For instance, take the synching-with-your-bank part. This software is going to have regular and automatic access to really important, really guarded, really weighty data that defines you in many ways.
So, really, none of this is a decision to be taken lightly. Factors like how quickly the connection occurs and the time of day you choose to connect your financial institution to your software all play into the setup time, which could range from a few hours to a week. It might also involve you making calls to your financial institutions. Some financial institutions are more electronically capable than others.
Perhaps your books are remarkably simple because you have no credit cards, no outstanding loans, and only one checking account with no savings account. Your account would get set up in a fraction of the time of someone who has multiple accounts that need to synch up.
Bottom line: Quicken is about as easy as Moneydance.
Design Quality: 4 Out of 5 Stars
Quicken has been doing this for a long time and has mastered the game. Quicken is actually run by the same company that has created the extremely simplistic Mint competitor, which we’ll get to momentarily in this Moneydance review.
Customer Service: 5 Out of 5 Stars
Intuit definitely has an edge here owed largely to the economies of scale of their market share. There’s a great customer service team that supports your use of the software. However, if you need more accounting-oriented questions answered, be prepared to pay a little more. They are generally great about covering strictly program-related issues, and because the software is used by so many people every day, you’re not very likely to run into any kind of bug.
Pros
Cons
For more information:
Mint Review
Image source: Investor Junkie
What is Mint, and why are we talking about it in this Moneydance review? Mint certainly hasn’t generated quite the same level of industry chatter as either Quicken or Moneydance. We’ll give you a hint: Mint is yet another brand of personal accounting software put out by—you guessed it—Intuit. Maybe Intuit is doing double time to try to replace its Quicken brand which may have left some users overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of the personal bookkeeping game as a whole. For whatever reason, Intuit is intent on making Mint the choice of those whose financial states are perpetually in Mint condition. Intuit says Mint is free.
Price:
So, you thought Intuit’s habit of constantly hitting you up for more cash to use Quicken was a little annoying, right? Well, Intuit’s Mint is what techies typically call a “freemium” kind of model. That’s because the gimmick here is that Mint offers you a highly simple and extremely bare-bones kind of program. It automatically classifies all of your payments for you, and you can’t change those classifications. When you do figure out that you need something a little more robust, that is when you’re faced with the option of easily upgrading to Intuit’s heavyweight, heavy-cost, sometimes subscription-only services.
Ease of Use: 4 Out of 5 Stars
Yes, it’s easier than Moneydance and Quicken—until it comes time for you to upgrade to one of Intuit’s other products. Keep in mind that, depending upon how complicated your finances are, the ease of use will vary. However, by design, Mint is simple. We decked it down one star because Mint recently ditched its ability to pay bills.
Setup Time: 4 Out of 5 Stars
Mint’s setup time is minimal, as it should be relative to Mint’s functionality compared with the other financial management tools. Recurring user issues with bank synchronization also prevent us from giving Mint a whole 5 out of 5 stars.
Design Quality: 5 Out of 5 Stars
We give Mint the 5-star design reluctantly only because there’s not a category for making it simple to onboard as many people as possible in order to transition them to a more expensive program later on. Mint boasts that its system handles complicated finances including investments, but if you’re managing investments, you’re probably going to want a little more control over how you categorize those accounts.
Customer Service: 2 Out of 5 Stars
You get what you pay for in terms of customer service with this free program. Okay, maybe a little bit more than nothing, but not much more! It’s not always easy to get help with Mint, but hey, it’s free.
Pros
Cons
For more information:
YNAB Review
Image source: Top Ten Reviews
You need a budget! If you get nothing else out of this Moneydance review, get that you need a budget. That also happens to be what our next personal bookkeeping program stands for: YNAB. Those who use YNAB swear by it. It’s a weird program with a method to its madness.
Price:
YNAB bills just under $90 annually, making it one of the priciest of the personal finance apps. This in the name of helping you budget the money that you already have.
Ease of Use: 2 Out of 5 Stars
There’s a steep learning curve here, not just for the software functionality, but for the methodology behind YNAB’s budgeting and accounting methods. Namely, YNAB’s system budgets for cash that you are already in possession of with less regard to expected receivables coming to you in the future.
Setup Time: 2 Out of 5 Stars
For a software class that is already tricky for many newbies to set up, attempting to buck the industry trends carries with it some more hitches of its own, complicating an already complicated process for some. However, YNAB promises a somewhat revolutionary methodology of living within your means.
Design Quality: 5 Out of 5 Stars
We give YNAB 5 out of 5 Stars because it goes out on a limb and designs from the philosophy of accounting up. And while this may or may not be a better way to conduct your personal financial affairs, YNAB takes the effort to try something different in the way of such a comprehensive, thoughtful design, which we applaud and reward here.
Customer Service: 1 Out of 5 Stars
We hate when you click the support or contact us buttons on the website and they throw up a whole bunch of other stuff that they want you to do instead. YNAB throws up walls on its website, and it does not offer a phone number when you hit “Contact us.” To us, that is a big no-no.
Pros
Cons
For more information:
Conclusion
We’d really like to recommend software not included in this Moneydance review, but if we’re limited to these options, Moneydance sure looks appealing. One of the options kind of related to one of the better items in this Moneydance review is Quickbooks. We like Quickbooks because of its mammoth, easily expandable capabilities for the whole of your financial life and also because of its option to buy a boxed version which we think Intuit is still making available.
The downside of Intuit, including its Mint product featured here, is its propensity to throw lots of other monthly fees at you in the form of more expensive, subscription-only services. So, in the end, the free Mint software isn’t so free after all. YNAB does its own thing, which we applaud, but we don’t applaud it possibly sabotaging your budget by adding more items for you to pay for regularly, which violates the fundamental principles of the conservative spending it promises to champion.
Image source: pixabay.com
And the truth is that all of these software programs are long-term commitments. As soon as you sign on for any of these items featured in this Moneydance review, you’re already committing a ton of time to the installation and connectivity of all your other financial institutions to the program, not to mention countless manual entries you’ll have to do to start getting your financial world under control.
For all of these reasons, we recommend that you start with the most capable Quicken (or Quickbooks) because of its power, so that you can get started with a system in which you’re not going to be forced to undergo any future cumbersome switchovers to a more capable program. The unfortunate trend in the software industry is that everyone’s trying to get you to commit to a monthly payment.
Resist the current, whether you choose Quicken or Moneydance, and insist on only paying a flat fee, one time, and upgrading only when absolutely necessary.