The last time I wrote about financial software was over 9 months ago. I was using jGnash2 at that point and grudgingly accepting. I soon lost interest in the manual pain it caused and got rid of it.

In my initial experiments, I had actually gone so far as to purchase Moneydance. I didn't like it initally, but most of that came from not being able to properly connect to my bank accounts due to some sort of certificate validation issue. Updates were issued, and I tried it again a few months ago.

As usual, connecting to financial institutions, getting everything categorized correctly, and dealing with different history lengths for each account was a pain. I spent a solid weekend working through all the backlog to get the accounts into some sort of understandable order.

The only problem I encountered when I started was that one of my credit cards was at FIA Card Services which did not provide any direct download options or any option to download anything but a completed statement. That credit card was sold to Bank of America, which delivers statements on stone tablets by carrier pigeon in Washington State. Since it was going through all these changes, I was going to be using it less, so I could stand a few transactions a week that were manually entered.

For investment accounts, it works pretty well. Even Quicken had problems with my 401k rounding the number of shares. Moneydance is about the same in that respect.

The other strange thing about Moneydance is that it will not do online accounts for loans. It's not a huge issue, but my mortgage took some tweaking to get it to the right place. Once it is set up correctly, it'll just keep scheduling payments and allocating interest/principal/escrow as expected.

I've been using this for about 3 months now without hating it, so that's something. Technically, the stock quotes are an extension, but that's not hard to install and use. They allowed 2010 users to upgrade to 2011 for free, others at a 50% discount. The license currently costs about $50. Hopefully, that's a one-time expense.

At this point, I have given up on most of the major players in the financial software world. I am currently using jGnash2 and it is working ok. I do miss the nice, clean reports and trends that I can see in Mint, Quicken, Yodlee, etc. I did try using AceMoney for the free trial period. While it was nice in some ways, I found the reporting to be almost useless.

jGnash2 has a few things I like. First, I can enter a lot of register entries without using my mouse much. They have some clever keyboard shortcuts that can really make life easiser. Second, the reports (while somewhat primitive) do give me what I want. Third, the stock quote integration is pretty good, and I don't have to think about it too much. I am manually managing everything now, so all the concerns about the import from investment institutions do not exist. 

Strangely enough, the last two things I like are also things I don't like. I'd love to have better reporting and useful imports from financial institutions. It's just that no one seems to provide that very well.

For now, I am sticking to jGnash. The only option I'm also looking at is KMyMoney. The last time I tried it, it crashed a lot on Windows. There's an update, so I might give it another whirl.

I have recently been looking for some new software to manage my finances. Several years ago, I used Quicken. When I had to upgrade or lose my ability to update my accounts automatically, I switched to Mint. When Mint was bought by Intuit, I left and started using Yodlee Moneycenter. When they started forcing me on to their latest redesign, I stopped using them. I have reasons for not liking Intuit and not wanting to give them any business. I won't explain in further detail here, but I don't want to support them in any way.

I've looked around at other sites and even tried going back to Mint. Mint bugged me because they still don't handle my 401k investments very well. Also, they would lose transactions from my credit card. These aren't completely Mint's fault (though Yodlee seems to have done better with the credit card). Both systems and most things I've looked at just don't really do much to help you compensate for what they do not know (i.e. cost basis).

As I see it (after much looking around), there are basically two major types of software out there for personal finance. The first type is aimed at giving you a ledger of cash accounts. These are very simple and (quite honestly) could be done with a spreadsheet. Yes, some of them have automatic updates from the banks. Still, they don't typically handle any sort of investments, which makes it impossible to see an overall financial status (which is really what I want). The other type is for all the people who have no control over their money at all. These are the budget programs. They all focus on helping you make a budget and track your progress against it. Again, they don't handle investments and some don't even handle mortgages.

The rest of the software falls just outside of these categories with features that include investments but not well or features that are just kind of out there. There are very few things that offer the type of overall finanical management that Quicken attempts (and still does not really do well). Why is a bulk of the non-Quicken market dedicated to those who can't balance their checkbook? Why can't I get a complete view of my finances and net worth without an interface that forces me to work for days to get all the backfill information into the system? Is anybody out there writing financial software for people who want to use financial software?