<div>I'm not the expert when it comes to home finance organization.......however, I seem to recall being pretty impressed with HomeBank. I'm not sure this fits your needs or not. It is worth a look.</div><div><br></div>
<div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><a href="http://homebank.free.fr/">http://homebank.free.fr</a></div><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 8:50 AM, Cameron Purvis <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:cameron.purvis@gmail.com">cameron.purvis@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">Hope everyone had a good holiday experience - sufficient quality and<br>
quantity food... :)<br>
<br>
So the calendar end of year is upon me. I have used Quicken for<br>
personal finances for a very, very long time and have upgraded every<br>
couple of years. Still, it's like the MS-Office case - it does all<br>
kinds of wonderful things, of which maybe 20% are things I use. I'd<br>
like to 'reboot' my financial management. I've tried a few things in<br>
the past but would love to hear from anyone out there who's doing<br>
personal finance work - what tools do you use?<br>
<br>
* Quicken - obviously the market leader. It has the benefit of being<br>
the most widely-supported app in terms of bank integration for<br>
downloading transactions, et c. Despite this, Intuit seems to be in a<br>
constant bug-fixing war. Version 2009 is much better but they<br>
basically trashed the UI, at least to my notice after moving from 2004<br>
(or 2005). It has lots of features that are nice but could probably<br>
be implemented outside the app like bill reminders, memorized<br>
transactions, et c.<br>
<br>
* GNUcash is the knee-jerk answer for OSS personal accounting. It<br>
uses a different mental model from Quicken, and I may be too stupid to<br>
use it. GNUcash looks like an awesome accounting app but may be<br>
overkill. Still, maybe it's time to cowboy up and learn it?<br>
<br>
* Spreadsheets - several friends of mine just use spreadsheets to do<br>
this. It is tempting to even do a google doc so that I have access<br>
everywhere but that gets close to the maybe-privacy-concern of...<br>
<br>
* <a href="http://mint.com" target="_blank">mint.com</a> which is surprisingly nice but really doesn't handle cash<br>
transactions very well at all - which is a problem for dinosaurs who<br>
still use cash a lot. Plus you are giving all your financial logins<br>
to a third party. Still if you're okay with that, it's a very very<br>
smooth service. Gaping hole in their functionality is that there is<br>
no concept of reconciling an account, so you can't 'close the books'<br>
on a monthly statement, quarter, et c. Also really works best if you<br>
knuckle under and use THEIR categories. Android and iPhone app is a<br>
bonus.<br>
<br>
* Moneydance - non OSS but I tried this ages ago. Kind of like<br>
Quicken's dumb cousin.<br>
<br>
* <a href="http://www.codelathe.com/mmex/" target="_blank">http://www.codelathe.com/mmex/</a> MoneyManager EX - looks like very<br>
similar to Quicken. Anyone used this?<br>
<br>
Who uses any of these? Do you have any others? I'd love to hear what<br>
you prefer (or loathe). My goal here is to have a reasonably good<br>
handle on financial ins and outs, the ability to use a relatively<br>
limited set of categories (utilities vs. groceries etc) for budgeting<br>
purposes, some ability to develop basic reporting (am I overspending,<br>
et c) and not spend too much time managing the whole thing.<br>
Surprisingly, Quicken for all its features turns out to NOT actually<br>
shave much time off the process.<br>
<br>
So - anybody got any input on this topic?<br>
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</blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Todd Morgan<br>Birmingham, AL<br>