Moneydance

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Moneydance is a personal finance software application developed by Reilly Technologies, USA. It's written in Java so it can be run on many different computers and operating systems. Under the hood Moneydance implements a double-entry bookkeeping system but the user interface is geared towards non-accountants.

Moneydance was started as an open source project in the summer of 1997 by Sean Reilly (who is still the primary developer) but was converted to a closed source product soon thereafter.

Moneydance implements the OFX protocol to perform online banking and bill payment. Other features include check printing, flexible graphing and reporting, scheduled transaction reminders, transaction tags, VAT/GST tracking, budget management and tracking, file encryption and investment portfolio management. Moneydance has been localized into French, German, UK English, Norwegian, Greek (partially), Spanish, Portuguese and Italian.

An open API (application programming interface) is available so people can write extensions to the program.

[edit] User Tips

Tracking Investments
- Adding a CD Account:
  - 1. Set up a new investment account (this is the main bank account where the CDs are purchased) using Account -> New Account and fill in form.
  - 2. Next, manually add each CD acount number using the Tools -> Edit Securities menu.
  - 3. Fill these dialog boxes in as follow:

   Security ID <- Money Market Certificate (or whatever metadata you want to identify these as - be consistent) 
   Security Name <- the CD account number 
   Ticker Symbol <- base this on the account number - should be unique and not conflict with an actual stock/mutual fund
   Value Prefix & Suffix <- leave empty 
   Decimal Places <- 2 
   uncheck show on home page

- - 4. Go to the portfolio view for the account created in step 1 by clicking on it on the homepage.
  - 5. Select the Securities Detail tab and then select Add Security button.
  - 6. Select the CD account number you wish to add from the pull down in the popup menu and enter add the metadata - note that this is where you can choose to label this a CD.
  - 7. Select the Register tab to get the transaction view.
  - 8. Choose New Transaction.
  - 9. At bottom of screen, going from left to right, enter the date CD was purchased, then change Xfr to Buy and then moving to the Security Category column (look at top of window) you can choose the CD account number using the up/down arrows, in the Shares/Price column enter the 1 in the lower box (this is the price) and then enter the total CD initial value as the shares and then select record to record this transaction.
  - 10. Repeat that process to get the CDs initialized. Note that Moneydance does not automatically calculate interest and apply dividends for you even though you enter this data - that data appears to be only metadata that is not used for computation.

- - In the 2007 release, there appears to be a bug when entering securities transactions. Sometimes the amount of shares that you initially enter seems to get multiplied by 100 which causes the balance computation to be off by a factor of 100, but the shares quantity in the ledger looks correct until you close and reopen the program. Then the ledger showes 100x more shares than entered and you can correct the amount to at this time which corrects the balance.