Alternatives to Quicken

[statsguy]

Maybe this is the year we drop Quicken. Having to upgrade to Quicken 2013 soon. We have been using Quicken since 1992 (well that is the oldest transactions I see just now).

Our situation is that we run Quicken on a Windows machine but for six or seven months a year we only have a Mac available. Ever since Quicken quit supporting Macs we have been having to run Quicken on our Mac using a windows emulator. It is clunky but it works.

This year we will be using the Mac from May to Christmas, so I plan on installing Gnucash and/or Moneydance. I will probably install both and run them side-by-side for a month or so.

I am still looking for comments about which runs best. Maybe there is another program you use, if so, let me know which you like.

The features we use in Quicken

For me the most convenient is the one-step update. We have 68 accounts (well I only update about 50 of those monthly) the others quarterly. Our bank has started charging for Quicken one-step update (our bank claims the charge is a pass-through charge from Quicken) so we update those two accounts monthly by logging into the bank and downloading it ourselves for free. .

I did not look closely at these two programs, but am still not ready to put our information in the cloud. I prefer a program that saves the information only on my harddrive.

I pay bills online but don't use Quicken so that feature is not as important.

I use Quicken to provide cost basis for our investments but I usually check the result too so this feature is not totally needed either.

Stats

[Jake46]

I switched from Quicken to iBank a couple of years ago. Data conversion was simple & iBank can do everything you are using Quicken for.

[clearwater]

I'm in the same bind as you. I've tried them all. Moneydance had a terrible user interface (although GnuCash was even worse). iBank had a better UI although still not great. Both of them had difficulty correctly importing large amounts of Quicken data.

I have data going back to 1992. I'd like to bring everything over correctly, but it seems like none of these applications work for this much data. In my experience trying to make it all work it was a mess. I suppose another option is to choose a cutoff date -- say go back 10 years, archive that to a new Quicken data file, and then just import that. I didn't try that but it might work better.

I use the Business features of Quicken Home and Business, and ultimately realized I'm kind of stuck. There are few packages that do things like this unless I get separate business accounting package as well -- just even more complexity since they're only available for Windows... and then I'm back to the same problem. Right now I'm running Quicken in Windows 7 as a VMware Fusion guest. One thing I do really like is at tax time importing stuff into TurboTax is a breeze, so that's a positive.

I keep hoping Apple will just write a decent Quicken competitor, already. It's low hanging fruit that almost everyone wants. Then again, they haven't updated iWork since 2009, so who knows. Maybe they're not interesting in building applications anymore. All the money is being made on phones apparently.

Note to statsguy: Also like you, I maintain an account of my own individual stock selections, replicating a high yield/low beta index fund. Your other postings on that were very valuable, so thanks. Seems like you, Petrocelli, and myself are the only people I know who have done that. It's been a good experience, and in actuality is another reason I'm kind of stuck with Quicken as it works pretty well for tracking individual securities.

[ThatGuy]

Quicken sucks, but it's still the best of an absolutely atrocious bunch of software. At this point I've given up on having a local database of financial transactions. However, I'm tempted to give Skrooge a try as I love the name.

[Blues]

Quicken sucks, but it's still the best of an absolutely atrocious bunch of software. At this point I've given up on having a local database of financial transactions. However, I'm tempted to give Skrooge a try as I love the name.

I agree on both counts. I'd been using Quicken since about 1990 or 1991 but a month or so back finally had enough of inputting and duplicating my monthly transactions and now rely on Vanguard's record keeping. (FWIW, the cost basis info for both Vanguard and Quicken were virtually identical. I believe there was one small anomaly with the Vanguard data actually being in my favor.)

[Rob5TCP]

I just switched from Microsoft Money (which was not great but better than Quicken) because support for it ended.
Within two week I found a loop in Quicken I could not get out of. Fortunately I am "obsessive" about backups and just
killed it and restored from 2 hours earlier.

Having looked at others, it's the best of a miserable lot. Too bad there isn't any real competition. Quicken has a
nice look, but for investments, it lags way behind Microsoft Money (and that was a 7 year old version).

I wish I had something better to recommend.

[fabdog]

I run the Apple provided bootcamp software on my Mac... you need a windows license to go with it... but then you boot up in Windows when you need it, otherwise into Mac

this has been a great solution for me

Mike

[Alex Frakt]

I switched from a very old version of Quicken to GnuCash for the bookkeeping needs of my wife's law firm. It works and is open source and free. However, like a lot of open source software, you have to be willing to spend some time figuring it out and/or tracking down the answers to any questions.

[Blues]

I switched from a very old version of Quicken

Alex, you wanna laugh, the last version of Quicken I ever purchased was Quicken '95 which they updated for free to Quicken '98 during the Y2K scare.

As I really only used it for inputting my investment transactions it was sufficient for my purposes...but finally I decided to let Vanguard do the heavy lifting for me since I'm primarily concerned about tracking cost basis and the rest of my needs are easily accomplished without the redundancy of effort.

[Hexdump]

What I use is KMyMoney.
I went from MSMoney to Quicken all the time trying other products like GnuCash and Moneydance and a few others before I settled on KMyMoney.

I have 2 investment companies, Fidelity and Vanguard with about 10 accounts combined.
4 banks, 6 credit cards, and 2 credit unions.
I one-button-push download from Fidelity and Vanguard and 2 of the credit cards. For some reason Amex forces me to do a manual download and import only when the monthly statement is ready. The rest of the downloads are done daily.
The transactions are put into the proper accounts and they require you to accept them or, if the 1st time for that merchant, edit the category.
The reports are pretty good and the ones I use the most are net worth, account balances, and budget vs actual.

The handling of mortgages is not quite correct but I work around it. You can correctly get an accurate equity number or an accurate interest expense, but not both. It's no big deal, just different.

Securities are named "accounts" for some reason and there are other different naming conventions that caused some confusion to begin with.

http://kmymoney2.sourceforge.net/windows-install.html

It's pretty good and I have not missed Quicken at all.

Give it a try.

[statsguy]

Looks like this post is back from the dead. Thanks for all the new comments about Quicken Alternatives. I am still searching too. Will switch over to Mac based product in May... and will report back anything I find out.

Note to statsguy: Also like you, I maintain an account of my own individual stock selections, replicating a high yield/low beta index fund. Your other postings on that were very valuable, so thanks. Seems like you, Petrocelli, and myself are the only people I know who have done that. It's been a good experience, and in actuality is another reason I'm kind of stuck with Quicken as it works pretty well for tracking individual securities.

We are not completely alone, there are three or four others who also own some individual stocks. We do because it is cheaper than the index. This year I will have a bit more turnover than usual as I plan to move some stocks around between the ROTH and taxable accounts.

Best of luck
Stats

[slheinlein]

I'm in a similar situation and I haven't found a good solution. Currently, I run a Windows virtual machine with Parallels to get to my quicken. Its sort of a pain but haven't found a better alternative and Quicken seems to own the market for personal finance software so I don't seeing anything coming out to replace on the MAC side.

[LazyNihilist]

I switched from a very old version of Quicken to GnuCash for the bookkeeping needs of my wife's law firm. It works and is open source and free. However, like a lot of open source software, you have to be willing to spend some time figuring it out and/or tracking down the answers to any questions.

+1 for GnuCash. It's pretty good. The double entry book keeping helps in maintaining the correct balance.

[CyberBob]

Check out iBank and iFinance and MoneyWell and MoneyWiz.

Bob

[SpaceCommander]

I tried Quicken and hated it. Found http://www.ynab.com and it was exactly what I was looking for.

It's not for investment tracking as much as for managing checking, savings & credit card accounts. Where other programs are looking backwards and merely track where your money went, YNAB is excellent at looking forward and helping you to plan your spending most efficiently. I've been using it and it is excellent. My only regret is not running it years ago.

[purple]

I am using portfolio-hub to track my investment portfolio.

[wjwhitney]

Why not just pick up a Windows laptop. They don't cost much. If all you want to do is Quicken, you could even go with a used one. For example, a Dell D610 can be had for about $100.

In fact, many of the more "cautious" bogleheads advocate having a dedicated PC that is used for financial stuff and nothing else.

[umfundi]

I still miss Managing Your Money.

I asked Andy Tobias about it once, and he said they messed up, not realizing that Windows would conquer the world. Then I used Quicken for a while until Intuit screwed me on licensing for TurboTax. My hard drive failed during tax season and they would not give me a new authorization code to reinstall on the new drive. I liked MS Money but eventually lost interest in maintaining my own data base.

Everything I need is online. I have gone paperless, and every routine bill is on autopay. I spend a few minutes each month reviewing my checking account and a couple of credit card statements. Yodlee is interesting, but I could never quite get it to consolidate ALL my accounts.

The stuff that drives me crazy, like reconciling medical bills, would not be helped by something like Quicken. We have to do that manually, with paper and a calculator. Blue Cross seems to be quite proud that their mailed statements have no record whatsoever.

Keith