How to use Moneydance.

June 7, 2007 9:31 AM

I came across the application Moneydance, and it looks like it would really help me keep track of my finances. But I need help to use it.

I'm not very good with Accounting, and I tried searching online for a Moneydance tutorial but came up empty.

Right now I just use an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of my expenses, but thought it might be a bit easier using Moneydance.

From searching I see some people on here do use Moneydance. Can you give me any pointers for using it?

posted by anonymous to Work & Money (4 answers total)

I use moneydance. It's a bit clunky in a number of areas, so my use is mostly limited to plugging everything in, categorizing expenses and income, and then running reports to have it tally up the totals.

I tried to use the budget tool and got nowhere. Also tried to track investments and was so bewildered I quickly deleted it. Tried to track my car loan but the numbers never added up so I abandoned that plan, too.

I didn't put a lot of time into trying to learn it so am happy to keep it simple and stupid, but would like to hear if there are more advanced features I could/should be making use of, too ....
posted by devbrain at 10:58 AM on June 7, 2007

My experience has been similar to devbrain's. I import my account transactions into MoneyDance; once I've categorized a transaction from Kroger as "Groceries," MoneyDance will automatically add future Kroger transactions to that same category. I end up with only about a dozen transactions a month that I need to manually categorize, so it's a huge timesaver.

Once my monthly spending is broken down I export the MoneyDance report with Categories into Excel and use filters to drill down on areas I want to analyze. MoneyDance's built in reports (and budgeting, and investment tracking) are either too klugy or too limited to do everything I need.
posted by junkbox at 11:14 AM on June 7, 2007

Sean Reilly developed Moneydance. He's a great guy, and surely would be able to either help or point you in the right direction. There's also a blog and active forum.
posted by Hankins at 11:42 AM on June 7, 2007

To get my car loan to work in Moneydance, I split the payment into principal and interest. Only subtract the principal from the loan balance.
posted by sparkzy at 10:30 PM on June 9, 2007