[Martin-Subbynet]

Hi peeps,

Looking for recommendations on Personal Finance Applications.... Does anyone use such software for their personal accounts?

I currently use MS Money, but tbh I don't like it at all, but the problem is finding a decent replacement - not many companies are making such software for the UK market.

Anyone got any ideas?

[rgbartlett]

It sounds daft, but I use Excel! It works fine for me, I've got different worksheets for each bank account, and it's dead easy to use internet banking to download each months data (or copy and paste from the transaction view) and paste it into each sheet. You can do loads of calculations, but all that depends on being able to use Excel.

Another couple that Google threw up which looked worth investigating include Moneydance 2008 (http://moneydance.com), Quicken (http://quicken.intuit.com/personal-finance/) which is an old player in this market, and quite a few companies are now offering hosted solutions (i.e. you use an online web based application to manage your finances).

If you're on a budget, this is worth checking out too

[Martin-Subbynet]

Hi Richard,

Thanks for replying!

Yeah Excel is something I use daily, but having used a dedicated application in the past I was somewhat spoiled by the features which now puts me off using Excel. I tend to go OTT when I do anything in Excel, adding lots of graph's, icons and colours to give a rich presentation of the data which is good in some circumstances, but I wanted more out of this application than I could do easily in Excel .

I have to admit I dismissed Quicken pretty much because the UK website states they pulled out of the market, and really I wanted something which worked with UK banks. I did notice a few on-line options, but honestly, I'm not too happy placing that data on the server of a 3rd party, if Google's brightest minds and its multi-billion dollar budget can't secure Gmail, then who knows what these startups have in place for security.

I was also told about MoneyDance on UKBF, and for $30'ish I thought I'd grab a copy (apparently Tesco Finance is the same application - different branding), but the big selling point was the API. The API is something I've not seen on other finance apps and I'm hoping in time to add my own functionality, things like downloading from my bank automatically at set times.

Its pretty good, better than MS Money which I had previously used so if anyone is interested I'd recommend it.

[Indizine]

I will move this to Finance forums where it should receive a better response.