The Infinite Kind Blog

As Gary V. Vaughan found out last year, Moneydance and Moleskines are two great tastes that go great together. Essentially store daily receipts in the Moleskin pocket and empty them out at night, while entering them into Moneydance.

I had been using my own version of this system until about September of last year, and it worked brilliantly for me.

Now that I have replaced my moleskin with a sleek little smart phone you may have heard of, I just take pictures of the receipts I get through out the day, and only keep the ones I need to keep. The rest go in the recycling bin as soon as I come across one.

How do you use Moneydance?

After many months in “preview” release mode, the first update to Moneydance 2008 is finally here! This update has a large number of bug fixes and feature improvements, including the following:

• Added option to store online passwords in the data file when file encryption is enabled
• Added GTE Cybertrust certificate which is used for new American Express OFX server
• Added display of cash balance, number of shares and value of shares to investment accounts on home page
• Fixed automatic entry of new security prices from a non-base-currency investment account
• Added preference setting to determine date window for potential matches to downloaded transactions
• Added currency symbols and "(Expenses)" label in cash flow reports
• Select the account under the cursor when right-clicking in the account or category list
• Internal URL handler now opens http: and https: URLs in an external browser
• Added popup display of splits and other information for the transaction under the mouse cursor when holding down the alt key
• Increased contrast in Net Worth toolbar graph
• Colors for same data sets in pie and line graphs now match
• Visual improvements to graphs
• Updated German, French and Italian translations
• Filter capital gains report by date. Also display a message instead of a blank report if there were no gains for the selected date range
• Income/Expenses thermometer graph now avoids jumping down a level when there is only one category in the thermometer if that one category actually has transactions
• Updated transaction status icons to include an 's' showing whether a transaction is part of a split
• Setting the correct exchange rate for downloaded transactions that are initially assigned to categories with a different currency
• Fixed a handful of bugs in the income/expenses graph on the summary screen
• Fixed bug that prevented elimination of previously matched transactions from download list
• Fixed NullPointerException error if the OFX authentication window is canceled
• Capital Gains report now shows correct total line instead of zero
• Reminders window now refreshes the list of reminders after a reminder has been edited
• Removed confirmation for changing transaction status using the register's context menu
• No longer show non-reinvested dividend transactions in cost basis reports
• Account balance graph now shows average of end-of-day balances instead of the balance after each and every transaction
• If an existing transaction in the register has the same FI transaction ID as a downloaded transaction but the amount is incorrect or the date is off by more than 15 days then assume the transaction ID is incorrect and they are different transactions.
• Fixed alignment of popup calendar when displayed in small windows such as reminder notifications
• Fixed window layout and behavior when adding an extension that does not have a trusted signature

If you have installed the Moneydance Updater extension you should automatically be notified of the new version, otherwise you can download it here: http://moneydance.com/

As always please let us know if you have any trouble updating. There are many options for getting help on our support page

Around 4am (Arizona), I woke up to the sound of my iphone doing a staccato dance on my night stand. We have been the target of a Joe Job. Essentially, someone (or more likely a spambot) forged their outgoing spam to have our support inbox’s email address as the sender. Due to the nature of email as a protocol, this is actually pretty easy to do, even if it is pretty evil minded.

This means two things. The first, if you sent me an email recently, I haven’t seen it yet. Mail.app (the mail client I use) has had a rough time even staying connected to our mail server. I will try my best to sift through the thousands of out of office and bounce messages but I might accidently overlook yours in the cleaning. The second, this Joe Job makes it look like we sent people spam. We didn’t. We will never ever send you an email that you don’t want. We hate spam, and more importantly we have ethics.

Here at Reilly Tech, we do our very best to help our users; we don’t annoy them with advertisements in our software, we don’t sunset product features, and we sure as hell don’t send spam.

It’s been over a year since the first release of Moneydance 2007, and we’re happy to present the final release of Moneydance 2008. Final, that is, until 2008r2 is ready.

The high-level list of changes over Moneydance 2007 are:

• Improved matching for downloaded transactions
• Zoom-able home page graph for quickly exploring your income and expenses
• Undo/Redo support when modifying transactions
• Over/under budget highlighting in toolbar graph
• Popup calendar for choosing dates
• New Capital Gains report

…among many other bug fixes and interface improvements. For the download, just hit the usual place: moneydance.com.

Of course we’d like to take a break after this release but there are just too many things on which we’re working. Stay tuned for more impressive features in 2008r2 as well as another unrelated application on which we’ve been working secretly for a while. Can you stand the suspense?!

Cheers, Sean

Another beta version of MD 2008 is now available fresh from the oven: http://moneydance.com/preview/

It is likely that this release will be the version that is made public as MD 2008. There are a number of changes that I had hoped to include but that got pushed off to MD2008r2. The most prominent of those included remembering encrypted online banking passwords and one-click downloading of all accounts.

The changes since build 603 are below…

• Fixed off-by-one date error on historic price calculation
• No longer attempt to find similar or matching transactions in investment account downloads, fixing #1568
• Fixed problem with account types being cut off in scrolling account/category popup
• Minor tweaks to register fields and account popup code
• Added drag and drop support for importing QIF, QFX, OFX, OFC files. Just drag the file to import into the main MD window or any register window (or onto the MD app icon on mac)
• Added keystroke (cmd-d/ctrl-d) for downloading transactions from within a register
• Got rid of icons for extension functions under the Extensions menu
• Only show file name instead of full path in main window title bar when on a Mac (full path is available by cmd-clicking the proxy icon)
• Fixed default import settings when we are creating a new data file from a QIF import
• Got rid of confirm-transaction-changes preference as it is no longer used with new transaction editor
• Fixed bug where negative actual income and budget amounts were drawn below the 0 axis
• Increased maximum number of transactions displayed in homepage income/expense graph to 100
• Transactions shown under homepage income/expense graph are now sorted by date
• Improved storage of multiple account/category selection in memorized graphs and reports
• cmd/ctrl-M now minimizes the main window and any secondary frames (but not dialogs)
• updated built-in documentation
• Additional/improved shortcuts for date fields including up/down arrows and spinning the month and year
• Changed popup calendar date chooser to only display upon mouse click in date fields
• No longer display black rectangle around most-recently-selected transaction (aka the shift-click anchor)
• Fixed QIF export bug in which the sign of split amounts was reversed
• Fixed focus issue with transaction register and transaction editor
• Slight improvements to auto-create transactions behavior

I’d appreciate everyone checking it out and letting me know if you come across any problems in regular use. As usual, the best place to report bugs is http://moneydance.com/trac/newticket.

Many of you already know Moneydance is one of the few applications capable of directly downloading your transactions directly from your bank. Sadly sometimes it’s not easy as it should be. Setting up direct OFX servers is costly for banks, and many opt to forgo that expense. Many instead use what is known as webconnect.

Webconnect is basically a mere lightweight alternative to true direct OFX. Instead of securely connecting to a dedicated OFX server, applications that use webconnect open a built in browser and then load up a secure webpage. And then it downloads a QFX file into some random folder somewhere on your computer and imports that into the software.

Moneydance doesn’t do this obviously. If you want to import a QFX file (or QIF or OFX files for that matter) into Moneydance, we urge to you to go to your Bank’s website and download it from there. Importing is a simple matter of opening the file with Moneydance. You can also import them via the import options in the file menu.

I like direct OFX connections; they’re simple and easy. Once you set up the connection details, all you have to do is hit download and bam! Your transactions are in your register, and you can go back to making mojitos for your loved ones. It really is nearly effortless.

But not all banks offer this service, because like I said, it’s pretty expensive to set up and maintain. But you know what? I think that cost is worth it. People switch banks to get this service. Right now there is a thread in our forums where someone is wondering to which bank she should switch her accounts. She wants direct OFX connections, and she wants them cheap (read: no fees!). I get several emails asking for the same thing everyday.

There used to be banks that offered free online banking, and not any of that watered down browser or webconnect based nonsense. Big banks like LaSalle and Netbank used to provide direct OFX for free. I wonder if there are any left that see the value in providing customers with such a vital service. Customers are clamoring for it.