I was a Quicken devotee for years, but eventually I fell off that wagon as the application bloated and became less and less reliable. I manage the money for my household, using trusty Excel spreadsheets, but I have to report quarterly budget numbers to my CFO (that is, my wife.) I’m only sort of joking about this; we sit down every few months and go over our spending, focusing especially on large quasi-capital expenditures and any significant variations in our budget. She’s very good at this big-picture review and it’s a very productive exercise. One hassle, though, is that I have to manually organize expense categories and it’s always been an approximation since I abandoned Quicken because I don’t have a good way of categorizing *everything* in Excel.

So I looked around recently to see what alternatives were out there; I’ve tried MS Money in the past and I have the same objections to it that I do to Quicken; it’s too big, too intrusive, too complex for what I want to do. And I cannot abide the advertising; give it to me for free with ads or make me pay but don’t make me pay and give me ads. I just want to organize expenditures by category, nothing else.

I tried Pear Budget, Money Manager Ex (promising, still in development), Mvelopes (nice, but not for me), Moneydance, GnuCash (oi!), AceMoney, and a couple of Excel-driven templates. Each had their advantages, but I kept going back to AceMoney which seemed to have the right balance of simplicity and features. It has good import/export, which is essential to me, since I do most of my household finance in Excel. It’s customizable, so I can make it look like I want it to. For example, I don’t really care about my different accounts (credit card and bank), since I’m just trying to track categories, so I dump all transactions into one account. AceMoney, for good reasons, isn’t expecting that behavior, but it allows me to have that transaction screen as the main window when I open the app up, so I see what I’m expecting, not what AceMoney is expecting.

The reporting is only so-so, but it has the report that I need, expenditures by category, so I’m happy. Categories are easily customizable, which is also crucial to me since I have a longstanding fixed classification scheme that my CFO would not look kindly at me changing.

I had a problem doing the data entry around the categories — I couldn’t figure out how to do it in batch mode, but the discussion boards were very helpful. It’s nice to see the developers answering user questions. And the developers are doing regular updates. I noticed a minor display problem with newly-created categories, a problem that was resolved in the last few days with the bugfix upgrade from 3.9.2 to 3.9.3.
It doesn’t do automatic downloads from my bank, which I think is a negative, but it has not in practice turned out to be a big deal. And it’s somehow safer, I think, for it not to have programmatic access to my bank account and credit card info. I really like Wesabe‘s promise as a Web 2.0 version of Quicken, but I can’t get over the mental hurdle of putting my financial transactions on a startup’s website. For me, AceMoney at least for the moment provides the right solution for my family’s household budget tracking needs. I recommend it.