As an engineer, I like my numbers raw and sliced only by spreadsheets and Perl scripts of my own design. So I’ve avoided commercial financial software for a long time and built up an increasingly sophisticated spreadsheet of my own to track anything and everything money related. (It’s an OpenDocument spreadsheet from OpenOffice/NeoOffice; if you’re being frugal, why buy Excel?) Manually entering data from multiple accounts and wrangling increasingly complex formulas has lost its luster, though, so I decided to give Quicken (for Mac) a try.
One of its big draws is automatically downloading data, though this only works for about half of my bank accounts. When it does work, you get a full transaction log, though it’s up to you to clean it up, balance it, and categorize the entries. For a few more accounts, there’s the more clunky login, download, and import procedures, and for the rest it’s back to manual entry.
Having everything in one place does have advantages; you can easily look at your budget across categories for different time periods or review stock holdings and tax implications from multiple brokerage accounts. At it’s heart, Quicken is still an accounting package and isn’t all that intuitive or user-friendly, though they provide wizards for common tasks. Also, while some common data mining and summaries are easy to generate, I’ve yet to find hooks for adding your own like keeping a running tally of money earmarked for taxes or estimating what kind of home I could afford in two years.
So far, it appears this may be a case of multiple tools being needed to cover all the aspects of a job.
