Best Personal Finance Software For Mac 2018 Australia

Try the best rated Mac personal finance software free for 30 days + get the free iPhone App! Your finances at your fingertips including budgets and real time expense tracking, you'll be a personal finance rock star in no time! The Moneydance Personal Software is available for both windows and Mac based PC’s. The software is easy to use and provides everything you need to manage your finances, bank online, pay bills online, establish and maintain a budget and track your investments.

Best personal finance software

Read on for our detailed analysis of each app

The wide availability of digital devices and mobile apps means that managing your personal finances is no longer such a challenge as it used to be. Rather than juggling pieces of paper, you can now run everything through a single software package.

Because the records are digital it means they are easy to store and backup, and different applications can be used either just on your PC or sometimes also on your smartphone.

The basic ones simply provide an easy portal for managing your finances, but some of the more advanced ones can help with reducing debt, managing budgets, or even provide finance advice as an additional service.

We'll therefore look at the best on the market for personal finance software, and show you the standout features of each one so that you can get a better idea of which would be best for you.

If you're looking to keep your business books with a bit more detail, check out our guide to the best accounting software.

• We've also chosen the best free software for small businesses

• Want your company or services to be added to this buyer’s guide? Please email your request to desire.athow@futurenet.com with the URL of the buying guide in the subject line.

1. Quicken

Fair pricing

Desktop and app

Quicken is a long-established tool for managing personal accounts, and while its reputation was built on a desktop version, it's now available to run as an app on your mobile devices.

Quicken offers a good range of financial reporting tools. These are set around a few different areas, namely budgeting, bills, accounts, and even investments. For budgeting, it offers you a chance to input your purchases and income so you can compare them both together to get a better idea of how much you are spending compared to how much you are earning.

In terms of bills, you can also see which utlities and similar you are constantly paying out to, and see both the amounts to be paid and how much money you have left over. For accounting purposes you can even bring your banking and credit card bills together in one place so that you have a very clear idea indeed of how much you're paying out. This is especially handy as people easily underestimate how much regular small purchases can add to costs.

For investments it also offers the ability to track these, whether as part of your savings, investment portfolio, or 401k pension plan. This means you have a clear idea of how much your savings and investments are worth, though it's fair to say you shouldn't panic about short-term fluctuations in the stock market.

Altogether, Quicken brings together your budgeting, banking, and investment reporting into a single dashboard, which you can view from your desktop or even via your cell phone from the mobile app.

Pricing starts at $34.99 a year for the Starter Plan which covers most of the basic features, though the Deluxe plan at $39.99 a year allows for additional budgeting and goal setting.

2. Personal Capital

Fees are lower than most

Not suitable for those outside the US

Personal Capital's primary function is to track your investments, assets and savings, rather than specifically looking after your current accounts. Are your assets working for you? Are you on course for a comfortable retirement? What can you do to be better off? Plug everything in and you'll be able to see the big picture of your finances.

Personal Capital offers specific advice and statistics based on your goals and your current standing, but access to human financial advisors is where the company makes its money.

While anyone is welcome to use its website, you can only access advisory services if you have an account minimum of $250,000, and there's an annual fee (of between 0.49% and 0.89%) to pay if you want your assets – this is lower than most financial advice services.

Overall, Personal Capital beings all your checkings and savings accounts, loans, mortgages, and 401k accounts into a single dashboard which can make it easier for you to manage your finances.

3. Buxfer

Buxfer Pilot

$1.99

Buxfer Plus

$3.99

Buxfer Basic

High level of encryption

Reporting options are limited

An online service that's not slathered in effects and colours, Buxfer does a good job of presenting your finances in a clean, professional manner. It cutely brags about the fact that it's currently helping its users manage over four trillion dollars in funds, so it's got a solid user base behind it.

You don't have to give Buxfer your exact banking details if you're uncomfortable doing so – you can opt for offline manual syncing with your bank account instead – but if you do trust it, there's a layer of high-level encryption to protect your data and the company is regularly audited.

We like its budgeting tools best of all – the visual reporting is very strong, and the fact that it doesn't force you into predefined categories and instead allows you to tag expenditures however you see fit means Buxfer should fit nicely into most people's banking lives.

The free version gets you five budgets, accounts and bill reminders, the Pilot version ($1.99 per month) adds on automatic tagging and bank syncing, the Plus version ($3.99 per month) gives you unlimited budgets, and the Pros version ($4.99 per month) includes online payments, advanced forecasts and more besides.

4. YNAB

YNAB

$6.99

Free trial

Limited features

Just in case you need to be told explicitly what to do, along comes YNAB - short for You Need A Budget. Because, hey, if you don't want to spend every single penny you have and more, you absolutely do need one. And perhaps you have more money than you thought?

YNAB's primary mission, as you might expect, is to help you curb overspending and avoid living from paycheck to paycheck. Stick to the program, temper your spending appropriately, and eventually YNAB will see you spending last month's money rather than that which you've just earned.

It's quick to install, supports the majority of transaction information downloadable from banks, and appropriately configures itself for personal or small business use by changing its monetary categories depending on your needs.

If you get off track, YNAB – which is reasonably forgiving and understanding for a bit of software – will tell you what you need to do to get back to where you need to be. You'll have to make sacrifices, but if it's guidance you need, this sets itself apart from the likes of Quicken.

5. Banktree

Supports multiple currencies

Banktree is more than happy to support worldwide currencies, and in fact does a solid job if you're working simultaneously with more than one, offering balances in multiple currencies rather than rounding them off into a single total. It's also good for keeping track of everything, allowing you to scan receipts with its mobile app and import them later on.

It's not the prettiest software around, and it's slightly more awkward to use than many of its more refined cousins, although Banktree does produce very neat reports which you can break down by time, or by payee. It may be worth experimenting with the free trial before you choose to invest in this one.

6. Money Dashboard

Features personalized tags that make budgeting easier

High security

This iOS/Android app doesn't try to reinvent the banking world or offer anything truly ground-breaking, but it is perhaps one of the most useful money management tools out there. Hook up every one of your UK bank and credit card accounts and you'll be able to see each of your balances in a single place with a single login. That in itself is enough for us to recommend it.

But there's more – Money Dashboard will track your spending, offering you an overall pie chart depicting your spending on loans, consumables, transport and the like. There's an at-a-glance overall balance, showing exactly how much money you have available across all of your accounts, and you can compare this to the previous month's figure to show how well you've been managing your funds. That's a great motivator.

It's super-safe, too: Money Dashboard locks down your login with an equivalent level of security to that of your bank, and it's completely read-only – your money isn't going anywhere.

7. Moneydance

Money management made easy with a simple interface

Strong reporting features

Made primarily for Mac users (but also out on Windows and Linux), Moneydance is a desktop money management package with a very neat single-window interface. Load it up and you'll get an instant view of your finances, upcoming bills, recent expenses and more. Click an item in the left hand sidebar and the main content changes to reflect it.

Its reporting features are quite strong if not spectacular to look at, and one of Moneydance's most useful sections is its account register. If you're old-school and once managed a cheque book, this operates on a very similar principle. There's also an iOS app for logging transactions on the go, which later syncs with the software on your desktop.

Unfortunately for UK users, Moneydance doesn't support the connection protocols used by UK banks, so you'll need to download your transaction history manually to keep on top of it and revert to your bank's own app to move money around. US users, however, are well covered.

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Best Personal Finance Software For Mac 2018 Australia

• IGG Software iBank 5

A few years back a world without Quicken as the mainstay of personal finance apps would have been unimaginable. It was the go to application for managing personal finances on your Mac. Now it’s hard to imagine that world without IGG Software’s iBank 5. iBank 5 is a best of class app that continues to add features and value and which should be your personal finance app of choice.

How easy is it to get iBank 5 up and running and so you can start tracking your current financial status? Let’s put it this way; I had 11 bank accounts and an investment account set up and all transactions imported in less time than it took to boil a pot of coffee water and steep a press pot. This is in large part because of an an optional IGG Software subscription service called Direct Access ($5 per month, $13 per quarter, or $40 per year), which connects directly to your banking institutions using your authentication information and downloads transactions directly into iBank 5.

If you prefer a more traditional method or prefer not to have an app access your banking data, iBank also offers options for manually entering your banking data or importing the Quicken or Microsoft Money files you can download from your bank. iBank also offers tools for easily migrating your data from other financial management tools such as Microsoft Money and Quicken.

Once your data is imported you do have to go about the business of matching your transaction data to expense categories. Fortunately iBank is a pretty quick study, capable of matching future transactions from the same vendors to the categories you originally mapped them to. If the default set of categories the app provides don’t suit your needs or are not as expansive as you need them to be, the Categories tool appearing in iBank’s library list lets you make quick work of adding, removing or updating categories.

iBank 5 organizes your banking data in a way that makes it easy for you to quickly assess your current balances. A Library list at the left of the app’s main window shows a list of your accounts, provides a basic set of reports, and tools for creating budgets. Items within iBank 5’s groupings can be dragged and reorganized in a way that makes sense to you. If you prefer an uncluttered look, any of the items appearing in the Library list can be hidden or revealed with the click of a button.

A summary displaying how much money you have and how much you owe appears at the bottom of the list. You have the option of selecting the accounts that are included in this summary. So, for example, if you share an account with someone but don’t want the money in that account to be included in your total net worth, you can easily exclude it.

Transactions appear in a ledger to the right of the Library list. Each transaction that appears in the list and for which you’ve supplied a category displays a small image representing the type of transaction you’re looking at. So a grocery purchase has a small grocery basket next to it and a gasoline purchase has an image of a fuel dispenser next to it. These images can be customized to your liking, but the reality is that they offer little in the way of real value. They’re just a kitschy addition to the app.

Best Personal Finance Software 2018

iBank 5 ships with several standard reports each of which gives a graphical overview of where you’ve spent your money. The app’s basic offering include income and expense reports for the last month, last year, and current year as well as a net worth report. The app’s existing reports can be customized to suit your specific needs or you can create your own reports by choosing the Add New Report option from the Tools menu. iBank 5 provides 10 starting points for reports, including Portfolio Summary, Category Detail, and Forecast reports. Once selected these accounts can be customized to include specific accounts and categories.

The app’s budgeting tools offer both the traditional budgeting method of making “guesstimates” of how much you hope to spend each month and comparing your actual estimate to that budgeted amount or the truly old-school method of envelope budgeting, which pre-allocates funds to specific budget categories from which you can then “draw” funds for payment in those categories. iBank 5’s budgeting tool walks you through a brief questionnaire about scheduled and unscheduled transactions, how much income you expect to see each month and where you expect to spend your money. I found the budgeting tools to be excellent and, if you choose to use the envelope method, simple, when necessary, to pull money from one envelope so you can put it another.

iBank offers a number of ways to make it easy to stay on top of your bills and to get them paid. Scheduled transactions automatically appear in the Calendar app. If your bank account is setup to use bill pay features you can use iBank 5 to pay your bills, with the added benefit that iBank 5 will first check to make sure that the transaction will not cause an overdraft.

Bottom line

iBank 5 is an excellent personal finance application that makes it effortless to track your financial transactions, stock portfolios, as well as create budgets and reports to help you assess your current and future financial status. There is no better financial app available today for your Mac.

Finance Software For Mac Reviews

• IGG Software iBank 5

  If you're looking for a Mac app to keep track of you finances, there's really nothing better than iBank 5.

  Pros

  • Comprehensive personal finance management
  • Excellent budget and reporting tools
  • Direct download of financial data using iBank 5's secure proprietary service
  • Supports manual data entry and importing data files downloaded directly from your web banking site