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Platforms: Mac OS
Forward "MacMoney is a personal and small business accounting program that's easy to use. It lets you manage and record your finances. A categories list represents the heart of the accounting software and you are in control of that list. It contains bank accounts, cash accounts, credit cards, assets, liabilities, income, and expenses." "InvoicIt is an add-on module for MacMoney to provide complete accounts receivable and invoicing features. When used with your active MacMoney data system you have complete 'up to the minute' reports of your financial position. A special Preferences option lets you choose to include sales tax and/or shipping subtotals on your invoices." The two paragraphs above are a direct quote from the Survivor Software web site, just to get you started. But let's digress for a moment about that site... Imagine you've been doing business in the Mac software market for a long time -- about as long as there's been a Mac. Imagine you've been doing this under the name of Survivor Software. Imagine you've had a web site since 1995 at www.survivor.com. Now imagine a hit TV show with the name of Survivor coming out and a gazillion people thinking they can get to the show's web site by typing survivor.com into their web browser. You can read all about the fun that ensued at www.survivor.com/thestory.html. End of digression.
About the Package MacMoney has been around a long time. I was emailing back and forth to Mike Farmer of Survivor Software about some issues I ran into and he remarked that he had spoken to Apple about the UI for MacMoney in 1983! This must be one of the very few programs that's survived (good company name) that long. The program was originally called the Home Accountant, if you can remember back that far. As to MacMoney itself: it comes on a CD with a PDF manual. This is not my favorite way to get documentation but it saves trees and it seems to be the only way we'll get docs in the future. The InvoicIt module came with a real paper manual with a copyright date of 1989, and was on floppy disk! Haven't seen one of those in ages, at least not one that wasn't dusty. This presented a problem, as I no longer had a Mac with a floppy drive, and I have no intention of buying a floppy drive -- or even a 100 MB super drive that can read floppies -- this late in the game. (I use 250 MB Zips for backup, and even they're not quite big enough.) But when he heard of this, Mike immediately sent the latest versions of both MacMoney and InvoicIt as email attachments, which nicely solved that problem. Survivor Software will be placing InvoicIt on the MacMoney CD once they work out the details.
Learning MacMoney
Forcing Myself To Keep Electronic Finances Despite my desire to do almost everything on the computer (my hand writing suffers from disuse now) keeping electronic financial records has always been something I've avoided. I've had various versions of Quicken dumped in my lap over the years and have never felt compelled to use them. I keep my personal and business records in a single file folder all year, sort them out into piles at tax time, and then use a Mac tax program to do my taxes. This seems simpler than setting up the books electronically. But if anything can get me started it could be MacMoney. I still dislike the whole process of gathering all the needed information to set up your books but that has more to do with fear-of-finances than anything else. MacMoney plus the manual will lead you through the process carefully and completely. Once set up, data entry is a simple and straightforward task. Appropriate windows seem to pop open when needed, almost by magic. From a functional point of view the program is well designed and eminently usable.
Reports You can create many different reports in MacMoney. Use the predefined ones and customize them if needed. The only quibble I have with this aspect of the program is that you don't get to choose font or font size in the Reports Preferences screen. You can select any combination of bold, outline and/or shadow to set the style of three levels of report headings and you can do that plus select a color for three levels of totals. A small sample shows you the results of your choices. But you then have to move to the Reports menu to select the font, and any such selection sets the font for all parts of all reports until you select another one. I'd like to see the font selection moved into the Reports prefs and I'd really like to be able to choose a unique font and size for each heading level and another for the numerals.
I stubbed my toe on one other aspect of Reports in MacMoney -- I was unable to print them. After trying to print and getting no response, I emailed for help and was told MacMoney has trouble with ATM (Adobe Type Manager) and that I should turn off ATM, restart and try again. I did that and still can't print from MacMoney. I have to submit this review now so I've run out of time to track this down. My system is well loaded and it may be that some other extension is causing the problem. But if I can print from any of dozens of other programs of all kinds, but not from MacMoney, then you know what I'm going to conclude. And having concluded that, I'm going to turn ATM back on again. As always your mileage may vary. You'd be well advised to check out this aspect of MacMoney when you try the demo (links available below).
InvoicIt
Other Features MacMoney, besides keeping track of your accounts, can help you plan for the future, with the capability to explore a loan, plan for retirement or calculate future value. About the only thing that people seem to want to do financially that MacMoney doesn't support is the tracking of investments on-line. If you need to bring old data into MacMoney to get started it can import from a number of different formats, including Quicken's QIF files and any SYLK file -- which means you can get your data out of any homemade Excel setup you might have been using.
Final Thoughts Is MacMoney worth a look? It certainly is. At a suggested retail price of US$49.95, and with a demo available to give it your personal tryout before you buy, you can hardly go wrong. The InvoicIt module, if you need it for business purposes, is also US$49.95 and also can be tried out first. Given the lack of invoice support in Quicken for Mac (it's only available in the Windows "pro" version), MacMoney looks like a great choice for a small business. If I were in the market for a financial software package, and especially if I needed to do invoicing, I'd take the time to do a serious evaluation of MacMoney/InvoicIt.
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