Many of these accounts are simply sub-accounts of our bank checking account, set up to facilitate tracking of expenses mainly… for example, “Christmas, DCL Account, House Fund, Jackie Clothes, Nathan Expenses,” and so on. Others are collections of different kinds of accounts, like “College Fund,” which is just a way of grouping various mutual funds and stock purchases. Each mutual fund is of course its own external account, depending on who manages the fund. “Super H Fund” for example is a place where we transfer funds from Checking in order to save for big purchases, like replacement windows or landscape projects. The money stays in the Checking account, but we use the sub account so it’s clear it’s been allocated for a particular purpose.

As I recall, Liquid Ledger sets up a bunch of sample accounts for your use when you first fire it up and import your data, but those are all just suggestions. You can manage your money however you see fit, I’m sure. If you don’t want an account for Utilities (we don’t, since we use the Quicken category feature for that), fine. But it’s nice to know it’s flexible enough to handle that kind of accounting for those who want it.

In any case, since Liquid Ledger still doesn’t handle investment accounts, I haven’t used it since doing the initial review. It’s in my “promising” category, and on the website it’s actually in the “Rejected”, not the “Recommended” list:
Here’s a direct link to the Liquid Ledger entry.

Also, with all of these programs, the handling of categories seems really clumsy. Quicken irks me as much as the next guy, but at least it has the ability to display categories hierarchically. I have a lot of categories, and having them all lined up flush against the right side of lists makes it pretty hard to find the exact one I’m looking for quickly. This goes for all of them I’ve tried so far.

I really appreciate the efforts to make nice interfaces, but I’m used to certain paradigms from Quicken, and any competing software is going to have to be comprehensible to me using those paradigms at least as a starting point. Otherwise I get confused and angry and quit using it right away.

Having read your reviews and tested a few of the options, I settled on Moneydance. I also used this a few years ago and to my not only does the current version perform all the tasks I needed (the same as your requirementss) but the developer also gave me the upgrade free because I paid my $30 as recently as…2004.

My ONLY grips is that it’s a JAVA and not OS X app, but the 2007 version is a lot snappier (and bug-free) that the previous.

I’d highly recommend it. I just upgraded, pulled in all my data (including investments) via QIF and am off. He allows for the development of extensions and has some useful ones on his site.

Thanks for the site and the much needed push.

- Ajay

I’ve used Quicken on and off for years and I simply wanted to try something that felt like it was coded for OS X. IMHO Moneydance is simple, inexpensive at $30 and does what it is suppose to do. I can’t wait for your Moneydance review.

Charlie, don’t be fooled by Liquid Ledger’s name… Quicken is just as much a ledger as Liquid is, but Liquid is quite a bit more flexible in entering, displaying, and searching your data. It’s also incredibly fast at importing Quicken data, so you should just download a copy and try it out sometime. Same with any of these, for that matter… Your question about data format is interesting and isn’t something I’ve considered. I’ll keep an eye out and try to note whether any of these products uses a relational database rather than a flat file to store its data. Of course, as mentioned before, my main concern is what your data export options are…

Reading Charlie’s post, is it known for Quicken to generally get flaky as the years rack up? It would affect my decision for when to switch.

After reading your article, I took a plunge and bought the pre-release of Cha-Ching! Several points made it a good buy:

1. Its cheap. $15 and we get the free upgrade to 1.0 whenever its released.

2. Simple. Its easy to use. I always lost myself in Quickbooks or quicken. True they have a lot of features, half of them I dont use.

3. Elegant, good looking. I like working in it, because its appealing. Every day I used it I learn something new and even if its under-achieving, Its a pre-release, but it works at what it has to do. for now it works for me.

4. The tech support is supperb. the few times I have had to talk to support, response is fast and accurate. The developers dont hide and always reply to you in a fast and courteous manner.

Version .5 is out and its the version I have been using. I imported .qif files easy. I am looking forward to the 1.0 release of this app. It looks promising.

Speaking of Parallels, though, I wonder if there are any other Windows-based money tools that can beat Money? If there were, I might be interested once I get an Intel-based Mac.