a/k

Finance Software for Mac

Personal financial software on Mac OS X tends to be like a Mennonite in a bar; he's either too young and foolish to know better or too old and bloated to care. Of course Quicken is available for Mac, but version 2007 feels like a nightmare, with so many windows and palettes and dialogues that it would confuse an expert. It is not a Mac citizen...it feels like someone tried to sneak a Windows app under the door and only half came through.

I determined to try the little apps by the smaller developers. Some are half-baked, some have halted development. I've finally found one that seems to fit my life, Moneywell. Moneywell is developed by Kevin Hoctor, entrepreneur and Christian, who has a family to support.

He develops Moneywell with a passion that shows up in his aggressive release cycle. 1.0 was released last August, but there's been like 23 updates since. If there's a bug, it gets fixed almost immediately. For instance, 1.3.1 was released April 23, 2008 with mostly speed optimizations. 2 days later 1.3.2 came along and fixed a few bugs from the 1.3.1 release. Now that's fast.

The latest version of Moneywell comes out of the box with scads of features. But the best thing is the approach to budgeting––one I promise you have never used before. It involves envelopes and allows you only to spend money you already have.

Moneywell 1.3 features:

- OS X Leopard compatible
- OFX, QFX, and QIF import w/duplicates review
- Scheduled transactions
- Multiple currencies
- Exchange rate conversions
- Single-click reconcile
- Password protection
- Localized currency and dates
- Split transactions
- Automatic Memorized transactions
- Spending plan w/cash flow management
- Income allocation w/prioritized buckets
- Click to filter graph
- Cash-only transactions
- Copy/Paste transactions to Numbers or Excel
- Transaction and tax reports
- Integrated search/filter

So this is not a paid ad. This is brilliant software that works for me and is only yet another example of the superior apps available for Mac OS X.