Macbook Financial Software

It has now been a couple weeks with my new Macbook Pro.  For the most part I am all transferred over from my Windows desktop.  I only turn it on now when needed.  One of those needs?  I use Microsoft Money for to keep track of how much money I have in all of my accounts, how much my stocks/portfolios are worth, and also for recurring transactions.  I don’t use it for reports or even much care about the categories and such.  Its easy to use, and I don’t need most of the stuff that comes with any of those other personal financial software programs.  So, when I got my Macbook, I needed to find another program to do these simple things.  I tried a few things and contemplated other ones.

The first thing I tried was Gnucash, a free open source program that according to most reviews is well received.  I downloaded it and followed the instructions on how to import my Money accounts.  I did so and things just did not look right.  I tried messing with it, but I think Gnucash was made by accountants or something because its way too complicated for me.  All I want is a simple checkbook register.  Its so confusing that an accountant considers everything an account, like actual bank accounts, credit cards, loans, etc.  I tried messing, but it was just too much for me.

I next tried Moneydance, which has a free trial and if you like it, costs 40 bucks.  Importing your Money is pretty similar to Gnucash.  After importing everything, it was like Gnucash in that a lot did not match up.  I figured that I had to pretty much start from scratch.  I decided that I would just enter everything myself from 2009 going forward, and everything before 2009 I would just put as my opening balance.  I entered all my stocks and downloaded the extension which updates stock prices.  I got that to work okay.  I started entering my stuff for my bank accounts, but I ran out of free transactions.  You get 100 transactions for the free trial.  So, I couldn’t get all my stuff in.  Oh well.  No big deal, so I just tried some of the functionality like the recurring transactions and stuff.  It seemed to work okay, but honestly I liked Money better.  Just thought it worked better.  Did I really want to pay $40 for something that might be better, and well, honestly I couldn’t even try completely since I ran out of free transactions?

I started thinking, and asked myself what I really wanted done.  Like I said above, I just wanted something to keep track of how much I had in all my accounts, keep track of my portfolio, and also my recurring transactions.  I honestly didn’t care about anything else.  So, I began thinking that I could do all of that myself in Excel, which I already have installed on my Mac.  I Googled a quick checkbook register sheet so I could copy the format.  Did so and spent some time pretty much making it look and function like what my Money program does.  I can go to each individual account and enter transactions, set up drop downs where you can select categories that I determine myself, keep a running balance, keep track of buying/selling stocks, etc.  After my stocks were in, I created another sheet with my entire portfolio and set it up so that I can automatically refresh the stock prices and thus keep track of my net worth.  I also can keep track of which ones are making me money or losing (its not exact as the formula I created is probably not the way its officially done, but I don’t need it to be exact).  I have another sheet which summarizes the balances of all my accounts and puts them on one sheet so I can see my overall net worth.  And finally, I set up a recurring transactions table where I can enter credit card payments and direct deposits that occur regularly.  This function is not quite what I’d like in that in Money the dates update automatically after I enter a transaction.  For this, I manually update the date, and then set up some rank and vlookup functions so that it always automatically sorts by date so I know what is coming up.

So, I will use this new excel sheet for a bit and if it will suffice, but I think it will.  Whatever doesn’t work, well, I’m proficient enough in Excel that I think I can change it to fit what I need.  Honestly, the part that took the longest was manually entering all my 2009 to current data.  But honestly, I figure even if I paid for Moneydance or used any other program, I’d have to do the same since it looked like my imports weren’t really working all that well anyway.  I guess looking down the road, the biggest drawback I’d have if I ever decided to use an actual finance program is that I’d not be able to import anything since this is my own creation.  But, I think this will work.  On a side note, I don’t think I like using Excel on Mac as much as on PC.  Maybe its just that some of the short cuts are not the same, I can’t use keys like F4 when locking cells in functions (I gotta look up how to do this), or use the end key and arrow key to get to the end or bottom of a sheet, etc, etc.  Also, in Windows, if I highly a bunch of cells and then hit delete, it deletes all those cells.  In Mac, when I do that, it only deletes the cell of the first cell selected.  What??  Its probably just a matter of learning the new keys and such, but as of now, it just doesn’t seem to work as well.  Oh well, I got what I need, and I think I’m happy for now.