Check out Money Manager EX which is free (unless you want to upgrade). I have been using it free for years for personal budgeting and found it works well. Had a friend recommend it to me. I find it easy to see where I am spending over time, and helpful for my budget requirements.
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In Reckon Home & Business “class” was renamed to “tag” & that’s how it operates. It means you can find or report by a tag filter, so I can get all reports (cash flow, tax, balance sheets, investments,…) report for me, or her, etc. Items I can’t immediately identify on import I can tag as an unknown & then get a transaction list of those only. I did pay a parents bills & get re-imbursments. With the tags I could quickly get a report and show the filtered detail. Where you have shared credit cards & other accounts, the ability to get alternate views should be mandatory. SOme systems have a dedicated tax tag. So transaction tags are really useful.
I can’t see any equivalent in GNUCash, Money Manager Ex, the new Pocket Money (free) (but was in the old version). Others? In Excel it is easy to add another column, or three.
If you can’t solve a problem with Excel, you haven’t tried hard enough. I’m a spreadsheet junkie 
Yes, that message is nice and clear. I’ll match you a Filter and raise you a Pivot table. 
But what if you are not a spread sheet junkie?
What if your software skills are zilch?
Or your knowledge of Microsoft only includes it is used to make mobile phones and now sells Surface tablets?
Or like one of the family who taught at university and got by using the thin client email and supplied browser? (Excel, Publisher and Word skills are optional for those who did Arts-Humanities back in the dark ages of IT.)
What if you live your life on a $200 Android tablet and second tier Samsung smart phone?
More than enough horsepower (or milliwatts) to manage a basic accounting record. I know it can be done, because I kept my basic accounts on a 2002 vintage PDA for many years.
If you are not born with Excel etc and use it daily, and need a software based solution, it would seem there is only one way to go. Free or paid, with the hard work done for you.
Hi @Kanga2
Absolutely not trying to ‘sell’ you anything or start a debate, just adding information to the discussion.
It has been a few years since I used GNUCash, more recently being captive to the US Quicken, but I would be surprised if that functionality was not possible, although perhaps in a different form with different words that result in a similar search or report in competent finance packages.
Sometimes one needs to look at the functions in a package and realise how to use them to get the desired outcome. It is not always obvious, package dependent.
Perhaps this GNUCash Q&A addresses it in ‘Answer 2’ as ‘a way to do’, noting ‘Answer 3’ is ‘No’
Therein lies a difference among us. If one can buy something that works for us and the price is right we might not want to try harder to use Excel. My main issue with Excel solutions are that year-to-year I sometimes learn or discover how to make it better, and it is not always a simple change although a change it can be.
The developers have a target user base and include the most common and then some functionality, and anything new is behind the curtains, no new effort required.
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Try free software called Wave. It is good according to the Treasurer of a non-profit who is a friend of mine. I use free stuff called Manager and have been for years. Both give you a set of books for free. They are more limited than MYOB, Quicken or Xero, but I get the reports I want - P & L, Balance Sheet, Trial Balance, Cash Book, Journals, Sales invoices, etc. Excel is not designed for bookkeeping but can be used if you are good at it.
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Go online and find something cheaper.
I used to use Quickbooks. I “bought” my licence, in the days before they changed to an annual licence fee. Then Microsoft crashed their Windows 7 operating system on my computer and I lost the lot.
Disgusted by Microsoft, I abandoned Windows and moved across to iMAC. There was no way I was prepared to pay Quickbooks $600 a year! And found there were several perfectly good systems**, ranging between free and around $50 (one off fee). By, by Quickbooks.
** I’m not trying to denigrate Quickbooks - I’m sure what they’re now offering is very good, and perfectly suited to the needs of whoever it’s perfectly suited to. I just don’t happen to be one of them.
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After you moved did you start doing regular backups of your accounts?
If an IMac crashes (and they have been known to as no device is 100% failproof), I hope that you have backed up your Quickbooks datafile on a removable storage (and hopefully at a different location in the case of a natural disaster/fire.
Not backing up, when a operating system (e.g. Apple OS or Windows) or hardware can fail at any time, is a sure way to end up in grief.
When in business I used both Quickbooks & MYOB. (Not at the same time though). Quickbooks was a lot simpler to use. Once I retired I used Quicken for a while, which was good for keeping track of shares & personal finance but it started to get expensive and my needs became simpler.
I then tried Grisbi and Gnucash and stayed with Gnucash for a number of years but have recently moved on to Homebank as nowadays I only want a simple budgeting tool and this seems to fit my needs but I have only been using it for a couple of months, so time will tell.
If anyone is after something more than personal accounting software there is an Australia one called Manager Accounting. It is a full on package with payroll & GST. You can find it on manager.io I also used it for about a year but it is far more than what I need.
Linux has been my daily drive for many many years but there are Windows versions of all the above programs.(Even Quicken worked in a fashion in Linux!). And they all keep the data on your computer and not in the cloud. And they are all free!
I have been using the system from https://www.manager.io for a year or so instead of MYOB. It has some nice features, is fast and tailorable but you need to invest the time to learn how it ticks. Free for local use and a subscription plan for a hosted service.
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Over the years I have used a number of software packages to manage personal finances and investments. In the end I settled with Quicken (the Australian vesion) and have been a loyal user for the last 15+ years. With Quicken being sold to Reckon and a number of seemingly different offerings available I am currently using Reckon Accounts 2020 which is a solid product (despite several quirks). Whilst using the software and retaining access to data, regrettably ongoing use is tied to a yearly subscription model. At the end of the day I don’t worry about the cost of yearly renewals as the subscription is claimed as a tax deduction, much like Money Magazine (in a digital version via Zinio), and my accountant has never had any issues with the claim as it makes their job easier to do when completing tax returns.
The one reason I gave up using it, despite the Aussie version and Tax Pack also being less than ideal. My experience as a user preceded the Aussie-fication. This clashed somewhat with decisions made in how we used the product.
But do they give you a discount in return?
The larger the accounting business the less likely might be a common experience.
A tax deduction for accounting services or software represents an expense and income foregone. The less it costs upfront the more you take home, personal or business, is it not?
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“When in business I used both Quickbooks & MYOB. (Not at the same time though). Quickbooks was a lot simpler to use. “
+1 I tried MYOB as a freelance contractor and it was way beyond what I needed, which was just to track income & expenses and build a P&L. For forecasting I use excel. Went with reckon for many years and now with quickbooks.
I’d give Reckon a golden shonky. When STP got implemented just over a year ago, reckon nobbled my old outright purchase verson on 19 June, two weeks before the end of the financial year, to force me onto subscription. STP was an excuse, I had no employees. It was blackmail, can’t close out the year end without switching to cloud and monthly payments. Wound up letting it get nobbled, with a spreadsheet to cover adjustments for the last two weeks.
For last financial year switched to Quickbooks subs/cloud version as I couldn’t find any standalone that would import my reckon back data. Great product but possibly a bit lavish for personal accounts. While I now have the drawback of monthly subs and cloud data I have the satisfaction of not succumbing to Reckon’s blackmail.
Cheers skip
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As an accountant, I am terrible at managing my personal finances. Yes, I know what budgets are - I just don’t really have one except in my head.
I see a lot of recommendations pointing to Excel. This is a good idea if:
- you have strong Excel skills or are prepared to learn; and
- you know about and use appropriate error-checking to identify when (not if) you make a mistake.
I have seen too many Excel spreadsheets with basic errors to recommend Excel for most complex tasks.
That said, my mother wanted a spreadsheet to help her manage her finances and so I built one for her that I thought made everything pretty simple. She has never used it, and still keeps her finances in Word!
If you are a nerd you can build a decent Access database to use in managing your finances - but you need some skills there, too, although it is generally harder to make the same mistakes you can make in Excel if your database is well-designed. There are probably database templates out on the Internet that you could use - but again, are they well designed?
Were I to build a personal solution it would probably be in Excel - but that is where I have plenty of expertise. Do not try an Excel ‘solution’ if you are not entirely comfortable with how it works.
Looking at other free solutions (and looking at the article @phb linked), I have heard plenty of good things about Mint. That said, it is commercially owned and so the business model may change at any time. No idea how to export data, either.
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Well I have used over the years spreadsheet, then CA simply money, then MS money, but from Windows 95 on Quicken personal plus. The last upgrade I did was 2010, but runs without problems on current Win10. There is nothing else out there for my purposes of money tracking, budgetting, investment tracking and reporting. So my issue is do I just keep using my unsupported version, or subscribe to the current version. There’s many years of data I do not want to loose access to.
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+1, for their general practices. I started with Quicken AU about 20 years ago. I did upgrade after upgrade. Then changed PC & they only way to get it back was start with original version and install each upgrade until back to latest. the version around 2010 was probably peak best, after which subscription and change for change sake started it’s decline.
Thank you for the reminder to check. My Reckon H&B 2017 license expires in 2026. Until then it still looks best for purpose.
It was when I bought that I found they’d removed csv input on which I relied, using Excel to bulk update to friendly data. Trying to do that with qif’s etc was just not as practicle & not all sources had them. In the end, my need for accounts wasn’t as great as the effort to create them, so I settled on bare bones data in Excel. I now have a different need & am revisiting options.
Not so different - I agree with you. Excel is great for supplementary & purposes where (reasonably priced) apps don’t exist. I have a tendency to model things others wouldn’t dream of. It used to be easy and now is a real pain (not worth the effort) to import a Choice review table and re-order based on your own priorities.
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Keep going as long as you can.
Implement a generic file backup strategy.
- Export all your historic transaction records, category, accounts & other lists.
- Consider doing each year-end report.
- Export in a spreadsheet readable format: xls, csv, prn, tab delimited, etc. Worst case, a single line per item fixed column text report.
- Each year add to this & keep it safe.
- Perhaps one of the accountants can add to this
Great advice. (my bold) Have often been involved helping others find errors. Watch out for copy&paste!
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This thread has spurred me into a bit of research. I note with interest that Gnucash, a freebee, can understand the QIF file format that Quicken uses. Anyone out there had any experience with this for reading old data or full on conversion?
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No discount provided and nor do I ask for one. Perhaps goodwill is the winner here along with assurances that my tax affairs are in order.
I haven’t seen anyone mention Cashbook Complete - I’ve been using it for years and love it. Oz company, does GST well, local data file, free upgrades, imports .qif files just fine…
https://www.acclaimsoftware.com.au/. There’s a 90-day free trial, a one-time payment gets you a lifetime subscription with free updates, and the support is great.
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