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Once you have your Wells Fargo Online username and password, you can manage your accounts with our Wells Fargo Mobile app or via your mobile browser.So… I next turned my attention to Moneydance from The Infinite Kind and crossed my fingers that I wouldn’t need to go further down my list of Quicken alternatives. I’m a bit of a power user when it comes to tracking investments, and the reporting features (and lack of a true portfolio view) were deal killers for me.Access to your Accounts 24/7 Mint Conversion Information QuickBooks Mac Conv WC-WC QuickBooks Online Conv EWC-EWC QuickBooks Win Conv WC-WC Quicken Mac 16-.Access your checking, savings and other account information, pay bills, make transfers and more from your mobile device or computer with Wells Fargo Online® and the Wells Fargo Mobile® app. In short, iBank is a solid option, but it’s not right for me. It’s free and easy to use, our security is state-of-the-art and our 24/7 customer service is always available for whatever you need.On Monday I talked about my experiences moving from Quicken to iBank. Sign on for 24/7 account access to check balances, pay bills, transfer money, even open new accounts. Online and mobile banking has just about everything you can do in a branch, without the branch.However, I had read enough reviews that I was convinced that Moneydance was the next best option on my list. A limit of 100 transactions really isn’t enough to thoroughly test out the software, and I thought twice about even giving it a shot. Quicken or QuickBooks will connect automatically with Montecito Bank & Trust.Given that Moneydance costs $50 (though you can easily get a $10 discount more below) I wasn’t too crazy about this highly restrictive trial.
Access Online Bank Accounts For Both And Pc Quicken Mac Conv WCGetting your data into MoneydanceThe next step is to install and launch Moneydance. If you need details on exporting to QIF, check out my previous post. In fact, I used the exact same QIF export file for Moneydance that I used for iBank. Some of the balances were off by a bit, but it was close enough that I figured I could sort it out. I ended up with bizarre (and hugely negative) balance in our bank accounts, etc.I thus decided to start from scratch, but skip the “Import Account Info Only” step. The accounts got set up properly, but when I imported my transaction data, it was a mess. Once you’ve verified the accounts, uncheck that box and repeat the process to import your data.The trouble with this approach is that it didn’t work very well for me. All in all, it was pretty straightforward. This not only fixed underages in our bank accounts, it also fixed the overages in our investment accounts. This latter bit – the transfer out – got included in the split deposit, but then got duplicated on its own.Once I figured this out, however, it was an easy thing to cruise through out accounts and delete the duplicates. I’m talking here mainly of payroll deposits that included numerous deductions as well as a transfer out to a retirement account. But aside from this minor (very minor) complaint, Moneydance is a very impressive piece of software.In short, it shares none of the operational weaknesses that I identified in iBank: The interface is rather utilitarian, and the graphs are line and pie graphs similar to what you might cook up in Excel if you didn’t have a lot of time to pretty things up. Strengths and weaknessesRight off the bat, I noticed that Moneydance isn’t nearly as pretty as iBank. Fortunately, it was easy to re-assign the errant transactions from one account to the other such that I could ultimately delete the duplicate. Maison guitar serial numbersI’m not a programmer, so I won’t be doing any of this myself, but it’s nice to know that it’s a possibility, and that some other users have already written some handy extensions.Oh, and I almost forgot to mention… Moneydance is available for Mac, Windows, or Linux so you won’t be tied down to a single platform if you decide to use it for the long term. Like iBank, Moneydance also has online support forums where you can mingle with other users as well as support staff – or just search for people who have asked similar questions in the past.Another very nice aspect of Moneydance is that it has a public API, which means that users can right custom extensions to add desired features and customizations. It also supports online billpay, though I haven’t messed with this as I use our bank’s billpay interfaceIn terms of user support, there aren’t any built-in help files, but there is a very detailed pdf manual. Investment returns are rounded to the nearest hundredth of a percent (as opposed to whole percents) It supports specific ID of shares for tracking tax lots It allows you to enter exact transaction amounts to avoid rounding errors (and the need to compensate with $0.01 commissions) in investment accounts No, it’s not as pretty or polished as iBank, but the interface is definitely serviceable and it has a very robust feature set. The final analysisIn the final analysis, Moneydance looks like a winner. And yes, you can “unlike” the page later if you don’t want it cluttering up your account. In the left sidebar, you’ll see a link for a “ Discount Code.” Go ahead and click it – no code… But if you “Like” their page, a 20% discount code will appear, bringing the total price down to $40. That’s useless, since the value changes all the time. Secondly, investments show a cash balance rather than total number of shares. You have to use command N. First off, when entering transactions, it doesn’t offer a new blank line as Quicken did. You can, however, import an unlimited number of transactions, so you should be able to at least test out the import and mess around a little before making a final decision.After reading all the positive comments about MD, I bought it and was immediately unimpressed. I’m sure a few annoyances will crop up here or there, but I’m confident that I’ll be able to adjust and work around them – just like I did when I was first getting used to Quicken.Just be aware that the trial is (as I noted above) somewhat crippled, in that it can only handle 100 manually-entered transactions.
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