Mac money managers

by Jeffery Battersby, Macworld.com

Money today is a lot different from the days when paper bills, checks, and bank tellers were involved—now, you might never actually see any of those things. Most of us get a paycheck through direct deposit into a bank account. And you probably put away money into some sort of retirement fund. When it’s time to pay your bills, perhaps you use an online bill paying service, and when you make a purchase, you use an ATM card. Money, for the most part, is now a set of digits maintained by and institution that attaches the balance to your name.

With your money spread over several accounts and bills to pay, the challenge is to figure out where all your money is and where it’s going. Fortunately, as the places your money go get more disparate and complicated, the software tools for managing your money have gotten more sophisticated, as well; they’re able to aggregate information from a variety of sources and make it easier for you to see just what your money is doing.

The difficulty is finding the right personal finance software to fit your specific needs. The field of applications is broad, with options for managing your money from the iPhone, a desktop computer, or the Internet cloud. In most cases, each piece of the puzzle can be used separately or all three can be linked together. Unfortunately, no single application can fill all your needs.

We’ve pulled together a collection of applications that we think are among the best available for managing your personal finances. While each handles your finances in a different fashion, all are versatile enough to help you get a grip on where your money comes from, where it’s going, and how to keep some for when you retire.

Most of the applications in this list make some assumptions about the way you conduct your financial life: You already use some kind of Web banking provided by your bank. You pay your bills using a checkbook or your online banking account. You want to leverage tools that are already available to you from your bank. You want to see all your financial information in one place.

Mind money with your Mac

A long, long time ago in a... well, on your computer, it used to be that you had few options for managing your money. You could enter your info into a spreadsheet or use Quicken Essentials (). But over the last few years several new Mac money management applications have appeared, giving you several choices when it comes to how you choose to track your income and expenses.

Money3

Jumsoft’s Money3 ($39) is a beautifully designed money management application that offers a little more than what you’d expect from a personal finance program. While Money3 includes the typical budgeting, income, and expense features found in most financial management applications, Money3 also offers tools for managing small business inventory and invoicing.

For Web banking, Money3 uses an integrated Web browser that makes it easy for you to access your bank accounts without having to leave the program. While Money3 can’t automate the process of importing your banking information from the Web, when you download a QIF, CSV, OFX, or QFX from your bank while using Money3’s built-in browser, Money3 recognizes the file type and automatically starts the import process, allowing you to select a transaction’s category before the import completes. I found this feature to be almost as good as the automated data imports available in other programs.

SplashMoney

Splashdata’s SplashMoney ($20) offers money management with what I consider a pretty austere interface. It’s essentially good enough to get the job down, but definitely not something that you’re going to be writing home about. But, while the program isn’t as beautiful, well designed, or feature-rich as many of the other programs we’re looking at here, it does a fine job of handling your finances.

SplashMoney offers a typical array of features, including basic reporting, budgeting, and account reconciliation. Like the other programs, SplashMoney can automatically download data from many banks, but, as was the case with other programs, the way SplashMoney links to the banks that I use requires that I pay an additional monthly fee. Fortunately, SplashMoney can import data in QIF, CSV, OFX, or QFX formats, so it’s not hard to get your banking data to work with SplashMoney.

Cha-Ching 2

Midnight Apps’ Cha-Ching 2 is currently in beta, but it’s slick enough that we think it’s worth a mention. Cha-Ching is another new, beautiful Cocoa application that is designed in way that makes it easy for you to use. While each transaction appears in a ledger-like list, when you select a transaction in Cha-Ching a small receipt appears to the right of the ledger that allows you to add more detail about the transaction. To help you keep track of your income and expenses, Cha-Ching makes use of smart folders and offers an easy to use budget tool. On the whole, Cha-Ching is a financial management application that we can’t wait to see come out of beta.

Fortora Fresh Finance

Fortora Fresh Finance ($45) is a cross-platform application that offers basic-but-useful tools for managing your personal finance. Fortora, like all the other desktop applications, can import a number of standard banking file formats, including OFX and QFX files, but required the for-pay bank service that most of the desktop applications needed to automatically download data from my banks.

Once you import data, Fortora’s home screen gives you an overview of your current financial status that displays your current net worth, a list of accounts, credits, and debits, and reminders of any upcoming bills or events that you’ve scheduled. Fortora automatically creates a list of payees from the data that you import and comes preconfigured with a standard set of categories that you can use on your transactions. You can also easily create customized budgets and reports and save them for later use.

Fortora Fresh Finance did exhibit a couple of minor bugs. For example, I got an HTML error every time I tried to open the program’s help file and when using one of the two methods available for create new accounts, the window that was supposed to display a list of available banks was empty and the program wouldn’t let me proceed with the account creation. But I was able to workaround this problem using one of the other methods that Fortora offered for account creation.

MoneyWell

MoneyWell ($50) is one of two applications that gets a little old school when it comes to the way that you think about your personal finances. Remember when financial management meant going to the bank and dividing the cash that you had into separate envelopes, each designated for a specific part of your budget? One envelope for utilities, one for groceries, one for the car payment, one for entertainment, etc. The beauty of the envelope style of budget management is that, unlike a credit card or even a checking account, you can’t spend the money that’s not in the envelope.

Like Money3, MoneyWell is a well thought-out program that is a complete pleasure to use. And what makes it better than many personal financial applications is that it really tries to make you think about the money you’re making and where it’s going, and it requires you to plan out how you expect to budget your money. Instead of envelopes, MoneyWell uses the idea of buckets to track your money. You create income buckets for your salary, bonus, or other income sources and expense buckets for where you expect to spend your money. You set budgets for each expense bucket and priorities for how those buckets should be filled. As you receive new income, MoneyWell disperses your cash appropriately.

MoneyWell does allow you to download transactions directly from your online account, but for my banks that required that I use for-pay services that required a monthly fee, which is not something I wanted to do. Fortunately, Money well can also import data downloaded from your bank in QIF, CSV, OFX, or QFX formats.

Budget

I’ve been a fan of Budget ($40) since I first had the chance to use it as a Classic Mac OS application many years ago. Like MoneyWell, budget uses the envelope model as the way to manage your money. While I still like the way that Budget works, the interface is beginning to feel a little dated.

After you run through the initial setup process, which is really nothing more than setting up the envelopes/categories you want to use to hold your money, the way that Budget works is pretty simple. You create pay sources for your income, telling Budget what bank accounts to put your money into. You then adjust pay allocations so that your paycheck is distributed appropriately between each envelope. Once you have enough money in an envelope to pay a bill, you write a real check or pay your bill online and then use the envelopes debit or check options to take the money out of the envelope. Simple, effective, and really good.

Next: Track cash in the cloud