Comments on: iBank Review

By: Owen van Dijk

Owen van Dijk — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 02:05:04 +0000

Got here from your other list at http://www.hackerdude.com/2007/07/09/osx-personal-finance-software-alternatives/. I’m using Checkbook now…not a lot of features but i’m only starting so it works for me. Just wanted to let you know about this piece of software called Moneydance, biggest feature being crossplatform (mac/windows/linux) and read some good reviews ’bout it: http://moneydance.com/

By: john chandler

john chandler — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 23:58:24 +0000

Thanks for taking the time to post this review. I’m running quicken for Win via parallels and I just want something more convenient than having to boot into parallels to enter some transactions.

I’m going to transition with the new year, and I’ve kind of been holding out to see if Quicken was going to roll out their new version, but it’s not looking like it.

By: Mike Hardy

Mike Hardy — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 00:59:58 +0000

I’m so lazy. I just have a win2k (yep, it’s creaky) VM that I do nothing but drive quicken and some cycling software (that’s windows-specific) with.

I’ve got the VMware license anyway, and I’ve got the disk space, it’s so easy, why change ?

By: Hackerdude

Hackerdude — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 15:21:34 +0000

I did look at Wesabe. I used something similar called Mvelopes a while back (based on the concept of creating envelopes for each person you owe). It was similar in scope to wesabe - its budgeting was pretty sweet - you should check it out.

Cha-ching was a lot of eye candy, some very nice features but nothing that really compelled me. In addition its investment tracking was very poor, and that is important for me.

I’ll probably keep using iBank for a year (and will upgrade when 3 comes along) and reevaluate at that time.

The good thing about the oligopolists being absent (either by their actions or their attitude) from this space is that there is a real market mushrooming (I love competition, it gives me choices). If things keep up like this in a couple of years we’ll have some very good contenders. Nothing would tickle me more than one of these contenders to get really good, then pull an iTunes with a Windows port and take their side of the fence by surprise.

By: Rob Meyer

Rob Meyer — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 14:11:08 +0000

Have you looked at wesabe.com? I’m giving it a run, because all I really need is budget/spending tracking. It’s interesting at least.

I tried iBank/Quicken and wasn’t impressed. ChaChing was closer, but I didn’t find the UI keyboard shortcut friendly enough, and unless I was missing something, transaction names could only be like 30 characters wide. The full description was in the OFX file, but ChaChing only took the first 35 or so. My bank prefaces all the transactions with “WITHDRAWAL ATM@00025 ” or some such nonsense, so I couldn’t actually see what they were, and nothing ever got auto-categorized.

I like Wesabe ’cause the three most important things for me are easy categorization, easy splitting of transactions, and then tracking of those categories. I’m probably atypical though.