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Future project suggestions

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Josh

22 Jun, 2018 10:40 AM

Hi,

I am currently evaluating MoneyDance with a potential view of purchasing a licence.

Will there be a new version out this year? The 2018 one?
Will a 'savings goal' be within the next version?

Thanks,
Josh

1. 1 Posted by dwg on 22 Jun, 2018 11:20 AM

   

   I'm a fellow user.

   The Infinite Kind, the company behind Moneydance, have a policy of not discussing futures or potential release dates.

   As a user all I can say is not I have not seen any beta versions of the next release.

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2. 2 Posted by quotient on 22 Jun, 2018 06:05 PM

   

   I used savings goals in Quicken. I use "savings goals" in Moneydance. So far as I can tell, they work exactly the same way. But, maybe I don't understand what others mean by savings goals that would require a change in Moneydance.

   I have some expenses that are annual in nature, and large. I want to budget for those large expenses. Here's what I do. For checking accounts, I have a parent account (call it Total Account) that functions only as a totalizer account; the balance of the Total Account, exclusive of the child accounts, always remains $0. I have four child accounts of the Total Account, one called Taxes, one called Insurance, one called Balloon Payment, and one called Checking Use. All my outside deposits and outside payments are transactions in the Checking Use account. Monthly, I transfer money from Checking Use into each of the other three child accounts; I calculated the amount transferred monthly to the child accounts to be the amount of funds needed to pay the annual expenses from each when those payments are due. I transfer money out of the appropriate child account into the Checking Use account when the payments are made. For me, this system works well, and works exactly as it did in Quicken.

   What do others mean by "savings goals" that Moneydance can not now do?

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3. 3 Posted by josh on 24 Jun, 2018 01:35 PM

   

   Thanks, after having watached the only moneydance youtube tutorial that I could find, this seemed to be the only way really. Can you include the non-parent accounts, e.g. 'Taxes' in the budgetting feature of MoneyDance or would that not work? I haven't entered data yet myself to try it out and still I am considering whether to buy MoneyDance.

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4. 4 Posted by quotient on 24 Jun, 2018 02:08 PM

   

   I use my "Saving Goals" for my expenditure money management and am not especially familiar with Moneydance budgeting features. However, making parent and child accounts seems a basic part of Moneydance; I can't imagine why transferring money back and forth between them would break any feature of Moneydance.

   It's free to try out Moneydance; the download is the real, complete program except for a restriction to 100 manually entered transactions (you can download all the transactions you want to)

   You can have several separate Moneydance files; maybe create one "Play" account and see what happens?

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5. 5 Posted by TJ Finlinson on 30 Jun, 2018 06:35 PM

   

   Moneydance User here, but thought I'd throw my 2 cents in to your question about Savings Goals. I've always been very interested in savings goals and envelope budgeting. I've tried many of the workarounds for imlementing it with the current features and it has worked for a time, but became to cumbersome to maintain and I gave up on it.

   I recently became interested again to try and figure out a way to do savings goals and try to make it less time consuming to manage. I've put together a sample MD file and also a PDF outline of what I came up with. If you or anyone else is interested in playing with it's here for use. Also, I'd love feedback on this method and suggestions to make it better. It would be the bees knees if Moneydance would implement savings goals and envelope budgeting in a proper manner. The extension by Kevin called Money Foresight is a very valuable addition to Moneydance, and I would recommend getting it to help you with forecasting your account balances.

   The file can be used if you are running Moneydance and then do a restore/import from backup.

   • Sample_Savings_Goals_File.zip 493 KB
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6. System closed this discussion on 29 Sep, 2018 06:40 PM.