The wife and I are big on keeping track of our family finances. We have a monthly budget with over twenty categories that cover all of our expenses. Prior to switching from PC to Mac, we used Microsoft Money and a Google Spreadsheet to track our spending habits. Though workable, this process involved a lot of manual data entry and switching back and forth between MS Money and the browser.
We could certainly conceive of a better way to do this, we just were never able to find a software that could handle the intricacies of our method. For one thing, we often balance our budget each month by assigning money from one category to another. That capability alone was a “must-have” feature if we were ever to look into switching software.
With our recent switch from PC to Mac, we had to find new software because MS Money is no longer being developed and is therefore unavailable on a Mac. Having read many reviews on many softwares, we are currently evaluating a trial version of MoneyWell.
MoneyWell - One Window Finance Tracking
So far we like it a lot. It’s as if the developers based their design off of our system. Here are some of the features that we like:
- “Buckets” – These are similar to the “envelop” concept of budgeting. You define the “buckets” that match your spending categories (e.g. gas, groceries, gifts, etc). Then, each month these buckets get “filled” by your salary when it’s deposited in your bank account.
- Bucket Flexibility – For us, this is MoneyWell’s “killer feature”. You can transfer money from one bucket to another. This was the major drawback to us using an online service like Mint.com.
- Account Syncing – As would be expected with modern persona finance software, MoneyWell syncs with your bank accounts and credit cards. We’re keeping our eye on this feature to make sure that it syncs perfectly (we noticed that Mint.com didn’t always do this).
- MoneyWell for iPhone – We haven’t tried this one out yet, but we will if we decide to fully commit to MoneyWell. It appears that this app will let us track our finances and enter transactions while we’re “on the road”. Then it will sync with the desktop software. Therefore, we can do things like find out how much money is left in our monthly food budget when deciding if we should go out to eat.
