Moneydance and planning future income

Today I received a question about an earlier post I made about Moneydance.

Good morning

I saw your post about Moneydance

I d like to know if it possible to put future income - design jobs [website, catalogs, magazine] monthly or quarterly and check if they get done or not done and paid?

Also a flow graph with income and expenses for past future monthly or yearly



Thanks

The way I budget future income on Moneydance is by using the transaction reminder option. Go to "Tools" then "Reminders" and add a new transaction reminder. Daily allows repeating every so many days, weekly is every so many weeks on a certain day, monthly is every month on a certain day, and annually is just what it sounds like - once a year. The transaction reminder also allows specifying the amount, what account it is using, and who the payee is.

I put my salary in there with how much I'm expecting to get paid and have it set to go every other Friday. The only small issue with this approach: the cashflow graphs and similar tools in Moneydance only include transactions that have been entered, but do not include reminders. There are two ways around that issue:

1. Use the balance predictor extension. This has the option of projecting how much money you should have in the future based on all the reminders you have.

2. Go ahead and enter the income & expenses you're expecting and put "FUTURE" in the memo field. Just don't forget that these haven't actually happened yet & remove the "FUTURE" word once it does actually happen.

You could also enter "DONE" or "NOT DONE" in the memo or tags on the transaction to indicate whether the freelance job is done yet or not.

The Moneydance report & graphing tools will let you specify what dates (past or future) you want to see.

Quick date entry in Moneydance 2007

I stumbled across a cool little feature in Moneydance 2007 recently. It may be in early versions, but this is the first version I've seen it.

When entering transactions when you enter the date I'd been typing the whole date or using the arrow keys to edit the date. I found out if you enter the month and date such as 2/25 it will auto-fill the year. If you just put the date, it will fill in the current month and year. So if you just type 25 right now (February 25, 2007) you'll get 2/25/2007.

Moneydance 2007 keyboard shortcut tip

When I switched back to Moneydance after using other personal finances software for almost a month, I had a few transactions to enter and then had to balance my accounts. One of them had quite a few transactions to mark as cleared. It seemed like it would take a while. I accidentally found a shortcut that makes it pretty fast.

1. Click on the account you want to reconcile and hit "Actions" and then "Reconcile"
2. Enter the ending balance and hit "OK".
3. You'll have a list of all the deposits and withdrawals for that account that have not been marked as cleared yet. Find the earliest transaction that has cleared and click on the field that indicates if it has cleared yet.
4. Once that transaction has been marked as cleared, hit the down arrow on your keyboard.
   
5. This should select the next transaction in the list and mark it as cleared too.
6. Repeat hitting the down arrow until all the cleared transactions have been marked as cleared.

I wonder how many other little shortcuts like this are in Moneydance that I don't know about?

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.

money management technologies

I've used quite a wide variety of money management software and technology. I started out with just my checkbook which worked out great when all I did was pay my phone bill once a month, textbooks once a semester, and ordered the occasional pizza. It didn't take long after getting out into the "real world" that I quickly realized something slightly more advanced would be needed. For a while I used a spreadsheet created in OpenOffice but once you get above two pages or so of transactions, that becomes fairly cumbersome.

I'll save any of you who are Mac users with a simple amount of finances to track some reading: if you have one checking account, one savings account, and one credit card or a similarly simple setup, check out Cashbox - it is free and open source and will most likely do what you want it to.

Soon after, I discovered personal finance software. gnucash worked great for quite a while once I got it installed. If you use Linux or MacOS/X and want a full-featured financial application for free, give Gnucash a try. It may be overkill for some people. Also, a word of warning: don't try to install it without some kind of package manager such as apt-get on Linux or fink on OS/X. You'll spend hours trying to install all the required pieces of software it depends on manually. On OS/X, you'll need to install X11 first.

Gnucash worked out great until I upgraded my Linux install and it dropped gtk1 support in favor of gtk2, and I couldn't get it working again. And that is when I found Moneydance - my current preferred personal finance app, which I'll cover in detail later.

I used Moneydance until I bought a Mac, which came with Quicken 2002 for the Mac. I upgraded to Quicken 2005 for Mac thanks to a mail-in rebate that came with TurboTax. At one point, I started noticing some stability issues with Quicken and decided to go back to Moneydance.

Moneydance is written in Java, so it works (in theory) on any computer that supports Java. They officially support Windows, Mac, and Linux. I used it happily for over a year and then had a thought: I'm using the envelope system for budgeting after going through Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University class, why not use the envelope system for EVERYTHING? Enter the program known simply as Budget.

I purchased a copy of Budget because I was not happy with the way Moneydance did budgeting. It was $29.95 and came with free upgrades for life. They have a very active and helpful community and developers who actively answer questions on their forums. I just found myself not keeping track of my money as well as I had with Moneydance. There was just enough additional complexity that to me, it started feeling like more of a chore to keep track of my money. When you're used to a checkbook, the jump to using envelopes for everything was just too much of a mental jump. Maybe if I used it for a couple months more, I'd like it better, but I've got better things to do with my time.

I ended up purchasing Cha-Ching - a very promising looking program still in beta. They also boast an active forum with users supported each other and developers jumping in to answer questions too. Unfortunately, the budgeting part of Cha-Ching is currently completely unusable, making Moneydance or Budget seem like better options once again.

Just to put a weird spin on things, not two weeks after I bought Budget AND Cha-Ching, Moneydance 2007 becomes available as a free upgrade to anyone who purchased Moneydance after January 2004. So after I spend $45 for Budget and Cha-Ching and then a few hours messing with the two of them - here's the software I already use and really like is updated and the updates include enhanced budgeting functionality. If I had just waited a couple weeks, I would've saved time and money.

To keep this post from getting too long, I'm going to split off the descriptions of what is new in Moneydance 2007 into a different post.