Stumbling across a piece of financial software again - Moneydance Personal Finance Manager
I found Moneydance again today. Written by a guy called Scott Reilly, he’s been working on this piece of software for over a decade. I’m seriously considering migrating my 10 years of data from Microsoft Money over to Moneydance, it if runs ok. It means I’ll be free of being attached to Windows, and it will hopefully fix the glitch in my file that causes the balances on two of my accounts not to match.
I also like the idea that this one guy is building and maintaining this software: personal finance software isn’t a hard concept, once you get your head around the debits and credits and all those downloads. It shouldn’t need a whole division of Microsoft working on it, at least not for the basic needs that I have. Especially when you consider that the actual members of the Microsoft team have probably moved onto bigger and better things in the time between each release - I’d imagine the codebase is getting passed around like chinese whispers.
Scott Reilly looks like, from his various posts I’ve read on the web, he looks and sounds like he lives breathes and loves his product. For me, that’s important - I want to give this Moneydance a go. Although just a single developer, I feel re-assured that I won’t be locked into Moneydance if I move my transactions over - more than I can say than for Microsoft.
Its also a good opportunity to cleanse my data and see what are the reports I really need out of my personal finance software. The plan is that I’ll parallel run it for a few weeks, as I migrate my data and get used to it.