Where is my iFinanceManager?

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I'm dismayed at the lack of quality personal finance apps for the Mac. Is it just me or do they all suck? I'm actually to the point where I'm seriously considering writing my own. I've been wanting to play around with Core Data anyway.

All I want is a Mac app that will:

  • Download my banking and credit card statements (or at least remind me to do it)
  • Suck the data in and save it in some kind of database
  • Automatically categorize the transactions according to rules I configure
  • Produce some cute graphs and pie charts to tell me what is going where
  • Do all of the above with a simple, no-nonsense UI

The point is to give me some additional visibility into what is happening and a permanent store of the information that I control, with as little effort on my part as is possible. I don't want to manually reconcile my balance. I don't want to write checks. I don't want to enter anything by hand.

That doesn't seem like it's asking a lot, but I can find no application that does these things. Quicken kind of does is but the UI is terrible and the auto-categorization doesn't exist. I've tried a dozen or so shareware and freeware apps, none of which do what I want.

5 Comments

Yaron said:

You should try out Moneydance. It is a Java app that I use on my Mac to handle my finances. It does everything you list although I think its report package is weak and it has some annoying bugs. But of all the options I've tried for the Mac it's the least sucky.

Yeah, I looked at Moneydance. It does seem to be the frontrunner of the Money/Quicken alternatives.

I found it somewhat baffling, and could not find a way to get it to autocategorize, but maybe I'll give it another look. Thanks.

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