Question – inspired by , as well as by Quicken boning my internet downloads again: What software / system do you use to track your finances? Do you hate it as much as I hate Quicken 2007 for Mac?
I’ve got perhaps the best overall personal financial tracking system of anyone that I know. A year ago, it was truly simple. All my internet downloads from my various banks and credit cards worked with Quicken. I would spend half an hour or so a week approving and tagging expenses, and generally making sure that I wasn’t getting ripped off. Once a month, I updated my simple spreadsheet that was able to answer all the questions that Quicken reports couldn’t.
Now, it appears that Quicken 2007 is being allowed to rot in support of some other product from Intuit. At this point *none* of my credit card downloads work right anymore, and the connection with Fidelity is a matter of bitter laughter. My bank still works okay, but I’m doing way too much manual data entry here.
If I’m to be pushed off my current platform, I’m going to look around and see what “modern” personal finance software looks like.
Here are my requirements:
* Gotta run seamlessly on a mac. Sorry, but there is no chance of me running anything like this under Parallels, much less buying a dedicated machine for it.
* Gotta keep my data on my machine. If the internet goes down, or if the software vendor goes bankrupt, I can’t lose my financial records. So, Quicken “all on the web, all the time” solution doesn’t look that great to me. Plus, um, security.
* Gotta automatically download account info from the various banks and credit cards that I use.
* Gotta support categories, subcategories, and split categories for expenses.
* Gotta support monthly expense / income reports by category.
So? What do all you clever and beautiful people use?
