What is MoneyDance? It’s the personal finance application I’ve used for the second longest time. I’ve actually used YNAB longer, but they’ve gone the subscription route and I prefer having a desktop-based application rather than relying on a web app.
In short, MoneyDance stands in the space normally occupied by Quicken but without the subscription fee and it is written in Java so it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux and likely other operating systems. There is a mobile iOS and Android app, but those are mostly for entering transactions on the go.
I recently revisited MoneyDance because I have decided to switch to primarily using Linux so my previous choice of Banktivity is no longer available as an option. On top of that, Banktivity has announced they are going the route of requiring a subscription for their software which is a major negative in my book. So what makes MoneyDance great?
- #1 Cross platform – as mentioned before, MoneyDance runs on multiple operating systems due to being written in Java. They officially support Windows, Mac, and Linux but could likely work on any desktop operating system that can run Java applications.
- #2 No subscription fees and generous upgrade policy & licensing – once you buy MoneyDance, it’s yours! You can keep using the version you bought as long as you want. If you buy a version of MoneyDance, the next version will be a free upgrade and the version after that will be available for half the price of the application.
- #3 The calendar – this is going to sound minor, but MoneyDance is one of the few applications that gives you a calendar view of the upcoming transactions. This gives you an easy at a glance way to see what you have coming up.
- #4 The budget bars – once you have a budget set up, you can select an option of showing a high level view of your budget in the header of the application. There is one bar that shows if you are on track for staying within your budget expenses and another to see if you’re on track for your expected income from your budget. You can click on it to see your expected vs actual numbers and the difference.
- #5 Investment tracking – you can track any stocks, bonds, mutual funds and anything else you have invested in the stock market.
- #6 Summary expense graph – on the main summary page, there is a graph that shows the biggest expenses you have by category, which expenses they are, and how much they are.
- #7 Reports, reports, and more reports – Banktivity comes with a ton of reports already baked in, and almost any of them can be customized to show different transactions based on account, tag, category, date, and just about anything else you can think of.
- #8 Budgets – you can have multiple budgets which means you can have different budgets for different reasons, or even just create a brand new budget if you want to handle your budget differently. Unlike some other applications, creating a new budget doesn’t mean you’d lose all your transactions.
- #9 Extensions – MoneyDance includes an API that lets developers write extensions to add new functionality to the application.
- #10 Forecasting and Savings Rate – these are actually both extensions. You can have MoneyDance forecast expected account balances based on scheduled transactions or once you have enough data entered based on previous historical data. Ideally you could see if your forecasted balance is going up and keep doing what you’re doing or going down and decide to save more. On a similar note, with the savings rate you can make sure you are on track to save a large enough chunk of your income to hit your financial goals.
If this sounds appealing to you, give MoneyDance a shot! Their trial period is 100 transactions (whether that takes you a week to hit or 6 months) and then when you purchase it, there’s a 90 day moneyback guarantee. The technical and customer support is great and they have quite the track record having been around since 1997.
I have personally used MoneyDance on and off since about 2004.
