several months after replacing quicken with moneydance
for the most part, bravo! the interface is more responsive and just feels more trustworthy than modern, buggy quicken. i'm starting to trust it like i did quicken before intuit turned that product into utter garbage.
here are the primary problems i've run into. none of these really prevent me from using moneydance effectively, but they are definitely some annoyances. in no order:
1) downloading transactions from the bank: there should be auto categorization for transactions that are identical to previous transactions. i should not have to select "Groceries" category every time i download a transaction from the same grocery store again and again. this is not all that horrible, but it is made worse by the very awkward way the interface behaves with downloaded transactions. they are not editable by default. you have to hit tab or enter or something, they are not automatically selected. if you double click on the category field, that klunky "merge" thing that appears at the bottom of the screen shifts all the registry entries so that your mouse is no longer above the category field that you double clicked on; and the highlighting changes and the whole thing is just very, very klunky to work with.
2) this is really already mentioned in 1, but it is so annoying that i want to point it out again... the odd section that pops up when you select a downloaded transaction is extremely awkward. when you select a transaction it pops up at the bottom of the registry; if you double click on a register entry, it goes away; then if you hit return on that entry, it pops up again. each time it shifts all the registry rows up or down. it drives me insane and is totally not intutive and really needs to be fixed. this is one thing that quicken still does better than MD. you get a separate and consistent window that pops up below the registry with your downloaded transactions. it does not shift the registry rows up and down repeatedly.
3) online bill payment menu item: i have about a 25% success rate sending online payments. i almost always get an error the first time i try and simply retry repeatedly until it succeeds. there's clearly some communication problem going on that could probably be handled in the background. maybe you don't wait long enough for a bank response, i don't know, but the user should not have to resend a valid entry repeatedly.
4) scheduled reminders: i saw there is already a feature/bug ticket or whatever on this one. if i schedule an online payment reminder, i should be able to convert that reminder into an online payment NOT a standard register entry. minor nuisance that i know you guys are working on.
overall, i give you a B- grade (where latest quicken would get about a D+ and Quicken '98 would get about an A). fix the above issues, and i could see giving you an A- :)
you guys are in a position to take over desktop personal finance. quicken is rumored to be giving up on the desktop market, MS Money is dead, etc... Please fix these minor nuisances so i can love moneydance as i once loved quicken :)
thanks
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1 Posted by Jessica Little on 29 Sep, 2010 03:54 PM
Thanks for the input. We're definitely aware of the various issue in the current transaction matching scheme, and we're working on a number of improvements for the next few releases of Moneydance.
As far as the bill pay bug, this a known (and incredibly frustrating) bug that we've been working on for a while and are inching closer to fixing. I've attached the ticket to this discussion, and if you wanna keep up with the latest news about it, you can follow the main discussion at https://infinitekind.lighthouseapp.com/projects/55695-moneydance/ti...
And the scheduled reminders feature request, as you said, we're still working on. :-)
Thanks again, for the input, and thanks for using Moneydance! Hopefully you'll enjoy the changes and improvements we have in store for the program.
Jessica Little
Moneydance Support
hlslaughter closed this discussion on 02 Oct, 2010 07:37 PM.
hlslaughter re-opened this discussion on 02 Oct, 2010 07:44 PM
2 Posted by hlslaughter on 02 Oct, 2010 07:44 PM
I figured you guys were on top of all this already.
Please do not wreck this product the way Intuit wrecked Quicken :)
I think the thing that killed that product was that once it was nearly perfect (cerca 1998), they had to continue to make changes to it to justify the money they extorted from users via forced upgrades every few years. The extortion sure worked, I upgraded against my will at least 3 times. And with each "upgrade" the product was more difficult to use or, worse, less reliable. Quicken 1998 was solid as a rock, and I came to entirely trust with my data. No corruption or problem with data at all, intuitive, i loved it. Quicken 2009 won't even import it's own backups without crashing. It's a horror show.
I sure hope you guys don't go evil as well.
hlslaughter closed this discussion on 02 Oct, 2010 07:45 PM.