Moneydance 2007

So - my all-time favorite personal finance program - Moneydance has received a new update here at the beginning of the new year. I'll try not to drag this out too long and just do a brief summary of what is new and improved.

• Icon - the new icon is slick. The old one was a green circle with the letter "M" in it. The new one is a wallet with money and debit cards.
• Expense graph on home page - Moneydance has always had a very nice "Home page" a view of all your major financial info at a glance. You can chose what is shown on your home page in the preferences. This version of MD includes an expense graph. It shows where the biggest chunks of your money is going in a color-coding graph based on categories. I know I spent $205.88 this month on groceries without digging into any reports. You can pick if you want to see expenses or incomes and what time period you want to see.
  
• Better budgeting: you can copy budgets and use an old budget as the basis for a new one - which is how I've been budgeting with spreadsheets since I started budgeting.
• Status graph: a little element on the top of the home page that can either show your expenses and income in a condensed graph or your net worth in a condensed graph. You can chose which budget to view and what time period to view.

I think it is going to be a long time before I change personal finance applications, especially if the Moneydance developers keep the free updates coming! And even if they aren't free, they are normally $15 and the full version is only $30.

The only thing that may get me to switch would be if Cha-Ching is updated to have all the features I use in Moneydance. That may take a while.