Software for Manging Finances?

sorcerer

My problem with on-line account, is that I have never found a company that does all of my banks. So without a company that can do everything, is pretty pointless. So i stick to Quicken, it does the job for me, even if I have to enter everything manually.

evenasus

buffman wrote: »

I still use Quicken. Nothing in the market is a patch on it even though the software is 8 years old!

Another vote for Quicken - I couldn't manage without it!

sleepymara

I am also looking for software/a spreadsheet to monitor investments. I put a regular contribution into my Stocks & Shares ISA and into my SIPP. Is there any easy way of seeing what my rate of return is to work out if it is currently beating the interest rate on my Cash ISA for instance?

innovate

I use an ancient Microsoft Money version, and wouldn't want to be without it. It's long been withdrawn from the UK market (2004? 2003?) so some of the features such as download of transactions from your current account only works for some banks now. But the features that are still working are brilliant, e.g.

1. regular payments (DDs, SOs) can be automatically entered into your bank account(s) x days before they are due
2. very easy transfer between your accounts
3. really nice budgeting facilities
4. very easy to use reporting facilities

Nothing rocket science. You could probably build something like that yourself in Excel or OpenOffice Calc, but it might be faster to track down a genuine copy on Amazon or somewhere (emphasis on genuine - - - there could be virus-infected copies out there that will attempt to capture your bank account information / login data, so be careful where you buy from. Personally wouldn't touch MS Money from ebay, for example).

EDIT: just re-reading my post & feel I should clarify: MS Money does NOT remove the need for you to set up and manage DDs or SOs etc etc etc in your bank accounts. It's just a really useful electronic notepad for all your finances.

Cyrus

I use the iFinance app for the macbook, think its pretty awesome. Use it every day and since I started using its totally helped me save money. If you can, you should check it out.

Michael_Nottingham

I am still on Quicken 98 - which works fine in Windows 7 - couldnt manage my finances without it
All my pensions, ISAs and bank accounts
Again - have to manually update - but have the data going back years and makes doing my tax return / tracking performance really easy

brasso

Moneydance for me.

I have used MS Money in the past and it did an essentially similar job but I prefer to use software that is current, and that will be maintained and enhanced to keep up with other changes.

You could do everything in Excel (or in a notebook for that matter) but it's nice to have some of the boring stuff automated, and be able to search quickly and report on the data with neater graphics than Excel.

MoneySaverLog

How safe is First Direct's money aggregator "Internet Banking Plus" They seem to work with a number of UK banks and financial services but am a bit worried about entering other banks security details into the software.

First Direct say that they install a "digital safe" on your PC but is any of this data visable to anyone other than myself by using it this way. Are the other banks going to show me as liable for any loss if I use this service. Can First Direct access any of my other account details including log ons of other banks in anyway?

savingforoz

There are also some changes to Moneydance in the offing which will make a great piece of software even better - the ability to do envelope style budgeting alongside regular budgeting and the facility to attach documents to files and transactions. It's already possible to do envelope budgeting using the sub-account facility but it's a little crude.

No idea when the changes will come in, though - Moneydance won't commit to a date.

Another plus is that's it's stable - no crashing or crap like that. Works fine, every time, totally reliable.

There's also Money Manager Ex (free), Gnucash (free) and Bank Tree.

jimjames

buffman wrote: »

I still use Quicken. Nothing in the market is a patch on it even though the software is 8 years old!

Still using Money 2000, 12 years old now. Until I find a suitable replacement I'm not switching either which is the reason they probably stopped making it as no-one bought new versions. The bit I find frustrating is the investment management but not found anything better yet.