Need Recommendations for financial software

srvctec · 02-24-08, 04:37 PM

Did a search and found this post by Amamba from almost a year ago. Is there any other financial software that has come out since then or that might be better? I'm not wanting to spend too much, but also want something that works well. I have MS Money 2004 on my PC (not currently using it) and may want to start using it to sync data to my PDA, but really just want something to keep track of my finances on my PDA (syncing is not absolutely a need at the moment- or should it be?).

I did see the free program in LocutusBorgMan's Best Pocket PC Freeware thread, but probably will need something that will keep track of more than just 3 accounts.

Amamba · 02-25-08, 07:39 AM

Originally Posted by srvctec

Did a search and found this post by Amamba from almost a year ago. Is there any other financial software that has come out since then or that might be better? I'm not wanting to spend too much, but also want something that works well. I have MS Money 2004 on my PC (not currently using it) and may want to start using it to sync data to my PDA, but really just want something to keep track of my finances on my PDA (syncing is not absolutely a need at the moment- or should it be?).

I did see the free program in LocutusBorgMan's Best Pocket PC Freeware thread, but probably will need something that will keep track of more than just 3 accounts.

Hate to disappoint you, but situation with financial software got worse since then.

Inesoft released Cash Org 2007, in my opinion a very flawed "upgrade". Some important features (like project-tied budgets) were lost. A lot of bugs were introduced, affecting sadly what used to be the strongest feature of CO - sync reliability. Customer support went from bad to non-existent.

SPB Finance hasn't been reliable (in my experience) from the start. I was never able to make it sync fully. There were also some annoyances in the way it worked, can't recall exactly what they were.

Nevertheless, there's nothing better than these two, unfortunately. At least nothing I can think of.

EDIT: Just re-read your post. If you don't intend to sync, then either program should do, where both of them have majority of problems is synchronization.

You may also look at AceMoney since it has it's own desktop version that doesn't sync but rather both versions use the same file located in user documents directory. However it hasn't been developed in a while and it doesn't support projects.

srvctec · 02-25-08, 08:49 PM

Thanks for the reply. That's what I kind of was guessing after spending several hours yesterday researching finance software and then testing SPB Finance for 2 or 3 hours. I first set it up to sync with MS Money 2004 and it worked OK, but the budget I had created in Money won't sync to my device. Then I created a budget on my device to test and it kept disappearing no matter what I did. Every single time I created a budget, it disappeared (when I was using the SPB Finance Money version).

I uninstalled the Money version and then installed the standard version (no sync) and created a budget and it's still there today, so there are definitely some problems with the sync version. Now I'm leaning towards just using SpreadCE to keep track of my accounts and just forget the Finance software thing altogether. I mainly just want to track balances and do some very basic budgeting. I can probably accomplish this in SpreadCE (already own it) without shelling out $25 - $40 for software that seems to be going by the wayside as far as PDAs go.

EDIT: I didn't read the manual prior to using SPB Finance, but just now found this in it

"Budgets, Memorized Transactions, Scheduled Transactions and some other
special objects like Investment Accounts are not synchronized between Spb
Finance and Money."

Guess that explains the no budget syncing. Now that I know that's how it's supposed to work, I might reconsider getting this to use. Another thing I just thought of is that I wouldn't be able to password protect my spreadsheet file, so SPB would be a much better option in that aspect, and also would have the added benefit of categories and payees which I have already imported from MS Money.

Amamba · 02-26-08, 10:28 AM

You can easily protect your spreadsheet by, say, putting it in a FreeOTFE container.

However, if you intend to eventually track all of your finances (including e.g. 401k and loans and such) you'll need a desktop application. No PDA software package I know of can provide this capability. If you have tons of data in a spreadsheet, migrating it would be not a small task. Not to mention the size of this spreadsheet 3-4 years from now.

Unfortunately, I can't really recommend anything. I own CashOrg and I am fed up with it - it's flaky and buggy and the developers are not helpful at all. It does sync a "general" budget but it doesn't let you have budgets associated with projects - this was one of the main selling points when I bought it but they deleted this feature in v2007. It is completely unaware of investments - there's simply no such thing in Inesoft's world. It syncs Payees now - and that's a disaster. Every time there's a transaction with an empty Payee field (e.g. a transfer from one account to another, where I wouldn't normally put anything in the Payee field) it creates some made-up payee for this transaction with name made of chinese characters. I have some 2,400 payees in my database now, about 1/3 or more are these "chinese" ghosts. It slows down CO startup by about 10-15 sec, from what I can see. I'd switch to Spb Finance but so far I wasn't even able to have one good complete sync using it. Good luck.

srvctec · 03-14-08, 12:41 AM

Bringing this thread back to life. This looks really promising. SplashData has just come out with a WM version of their SplashMoney within the last couple of months (I didn't even find out about this until a couple of days ago). I just downloaded it and will try it out for the next 30 days.

srvctec · 03-14-08, 09:38 PM

Yet another financial program tried and uninstalled. SplashMoney won't even display correctly on my device in most screens. This might have potential, but IMO should have been worked on much longer before it was even released for WM. It has a loooonnng way to go. Couldn't even use it for more than an hour or so, let alone 30 days.

The search continues... :rolling: