MoneyWell vs iBank

[Christian Thiemann]

Some days ago I asked Kevin for a refund and purchased iBank2 because
MoneyWell lacked multiple currency support and in four months I will
be in the States for at least three years so I needed a tool that can
track USD and EUR accounts simultaneously.

However, Kevin offered me to test the 1.3 beta with currency support
once it would be ready and extend the 60-day money-back period to
then. I gladly accepted and promised to write him about my personal
iBank vs MoneyWell experience... I haven't seen the 1.3 beta yet but I
made my decision already and thought I post the review here (any
comments welcome, of course).

The first thing that struck me about iBank was its Budget Monitor: It
lists every category (i.e. bucket) that you have set up a budget for
and shows a nice bar which is colored green, yellow or red if you
expenses in that category are below, approaching or over your budget.
You can view this for the last month, this month, this week, this
quarter and so on. This is really nice since I can see how I am on
budget with groceries or dining this week and not only how I am this
month. I tend to dine out with my college at lunch break (that is,
"dine" in a fast food place) and on a monthly budget I might end up
without any money for the month's last week because it's hard to
easily judge whether "xx EUR left" is still enough for the next two-
and-a-half weeks.

Another nice thing about iBank is that you can have sub-categories.
For example, I can track Entertainment and Entertainment:Movies so
that I can see in a report what I spent on entertainment in general
and on movies in particular.

However, that's the end of the good things (from my point of view).
Since you don't need to set up a budget for every category it doesn't
force you into a "bullet-proof" budget like MoneyWell (which one might
consider as "freedom" - anyhow, I like the strictness of the envelope
method). You can't setup a budget like "20 EUR per month for
entertainment, 10 of which are for movies" because any expenses in any
Entertainment:XXX category would add to the Entertainment budget.
iBank comes with two nice Dashboard Widgets which should provide an
easy look at your current budget and an easy transaction input
interface. However, the budget widget only shows you the total budget
(not split up into categories) and the input widget appears to be
somewhat broken, so they are not so useful after all. Also, in the
iBank forums there seems to be a whole lot of bug complaint activity
(especially after the new iBank3 version was released a few days
ago). And mentioned iBank3, the developers proved that they know
exactly what's really really important to a banking application:
Heavily pimped up CoreGraphics-animated pie charts and CoverFlow
visualization for transactions... *phew* *irony-
mode_now_off_again* ;-)

Ok, back to MoneyWell: I was surprised when I discovered the forums
and how actively Kevin is involved. There are some interesting not-so-
obvious features in MoneyWell that I got to know through the forums.
For example the running balance that is displayed in the status bar
when clicking a transaction of a previous day.

I also happened to grasp the full concept behind MoneyWell just a few
days ago which brightened my view of MoneyWell further... :-) Before,
I was struggling a little with the strictness of the bucket system
(see my post on initial setup from yesterday).

And one last thing: MoneyWell's user interface simply rules! Its
simple and elegant design is just great and gives an extra plus in the
comparison against iBank.

As I wrote above, I haven't been able to compare the currency support
in the two programs but I'd rather keep two MoneyWell documents for my
EUR and USD accounts than use iBank (which has only semi-support for
currencies anyway, as I discovered) so I trashed iBank today. Anyway,
I am confident that Kevin will make a good job on the currency support
(making it possible for me to stay with one MoneyWell document ;-) ).
Also, with the announcement of account/bucket hiding and scheduled
transactions MoneyWell catches up with iBank featurewise (account
hiding is implemented in iBank3, but only in a very crippled form -
scheduled transaction are nice and I am looking forward to see them in
MoneyWell, too).

As a suggestion / feature request, I'd like to mention that I really
liked the Budget Monitor in iBank which allows me to see how I am with
my spending plan on weekly basis... maybe there is an elegant way to
include this information in MoneyWell, too. For example by putting
ticks on the vertical axis of the expense graphs (if the spending plan
for this bucket is on a "per week" setting) where each tick
corresponds to a Sunday -- or precisely: each tick corresponds to the
amount of money that I planned to spent this month up to the first/
second/third/... Sunday. Or by putting small colored bars behind the
"XXX left to spend" text of each bucket that gives a visual feedback
on the current compliance with my spending plan (of all buckets at
once as in iBank's Budget Monitor).

Anyway, the decision for sticking with MoneyWell was made easy.
Again, thanks to Kevin for this great piece of software :-)

Cheers,
Christian

[Kevin Hoctor]

On Mar 11, 2008, at 8:06 AM, Christian Thiemann wrote:

> Anyway, the decision for sticking with MoneyWell was made easy.
> Again, thanks to Kevin for this great piece of software :-)

Christian,

Thank you for the detailed feedback and your willingness to stay with
MoneyWell to try out the 1.3 release. I know that there are so many
competitors in the personal finance software market, but I truly
believe that none of them will or have helped me with my spending
controls.

This release of MoneyWell has some big features and has tested my time
management skills, but I think you'll find that it is worth the wait.
The hard part for me is letting it go into beta without cleaning up
some of the new features, but I'm going to have to put it out there in
the next day or two because I really want everyone's feedback before I
lock down the new abilities. I'll try to post the form for joining the
beta later today.

Peace,

Kevin Hoctor
ke...@nothirst.com
No Thirst Software LLC
http://nothirst.com
http://kevinhoctor.blogspot.com

[swissmann]

I've been a long time Quicken then Moneybank then iBank user. iBank
does have a longer feature list than MoneyWell however like Christian
mentioned a couple of times those features are crippled. They exist
but their functionality or result ends up being something other than
what is expected. I have a huge list of examples but won't go into
that in detail here. Anyway I'm looking to make the switch from iBank
to Moneywell and here is to hoping that a couple of my must-haves make
it in the 1.3 release like various improvements to the way splits are
shown and the big one is a way to export it in a spreadsheet friendly
format for further analysis and manipulation.

I emailed Kevin my list of requests and bugs and he was very
responsive so thanks out to him. I am anxious to play with MoneyWell
1.3 - even if it is still in the beta stage.

[John]

I'm also a registered iBank 3 user that is probably going to be
switching to MoneyWell. The only feature-related reason that I'm
still on the fence is because iBank 3 supports iPhone
synchronization. That allows me to enter my transactions while on
the road (which happens *a lot*).

Unfortunately, I've had trouble with that iBank feature and, besides,
I did read that MoneyWell Mobile is at least being considered so
that's set my mind at ease a little. :)