MoneyWiz, the personal finance app I've always wanted?

Yup, I'm a geek enough to like to locally manage my finances across my portfolio.  As a corporate manager responsible for a significant budget for services and daily operations, apps like these are where I've learned the trade of watching and predicting where the precious pennies will end up and taking corrective action before the bank realises something's up ;-)

Going back a number of years, when I was a daily Windows guy, MS Money was the staple of champions (well that and Quicken). It allowed 'my types' to input or import transactions from on-line accounts which supported MS Money, do reconciliations and run reports to see trends and pattens and take action in real life.  They also have basic investment portfolio trackers which were okay for general use.

Since going Mac about six years ago, running MS Money on a virtual machine (vm) was a bit of a pain, for the obvious reasons of having  to open a memory intensive vm to run a personal finance app.  Added to which trying to share the data across Dropbox to another vm on my Macbook just didn't work. In the end, I was forced out of MS Money for the sheer reason of moving the vm and therefore MS Money to Windows 7 and it was no longer on the compatibility list once Microsoft had withdrawn support.

Next up was Jumsoft Money for Mac and iOS.  Importing account transactions from MS Money was a no-no, since it produced some erratic results and essentially did not work. It was a painful evening once I stopped MS Money to get set up everything up (accounts, recent transactions, scheduled transactions, reports) in Jumsoft Money and to get efficient with the user interface and overall experience. It was good, but not great.

Beyond being a native Mac app, the other benefit was for the first time being able to do updates on the move to the iPhone or iPad version and do local wifi sync to the desktop application. You would think I'd be happy, but the syncing would from time to time not work, coupled with the iPad version being removed by Jumsoft and prompting me to upgrade (£) to another version of Jumsoft Money. There was always the issue of being tied to syncing between the iOS device and the physical home machine, which after a while became restricting. A few conversations with support around Dropbox support for multiple Macs leading nowhere lead to a level if distrust with the developers and where they were headed with the roadmap. I've continued to use Jumsoft Money for the last 2 years.

MoneyWiz - made a good start..time will tell..

A couple of months ago, I saw a new app on the block: MoneyWiz. It seemed to get a higher than normal 5 star ratings on the Apps Store and I was intrigued. Most importantly, it featured a separate cloud sync option which all iOS and Mac instances talked to. I could have my cake and finally eat it for a personal finance program.

Importing data from Jumsoft Money was relatively straightforward and at more than 90% success, imported cleanly into MoneyWiz. There are some categories which need removal of duplicates due to the number of account imports I did, but on the whole, I was up and running almost immediately. First time sync to their cloud (which is based on email & password set up) takes a bit time, dependent on the number of transactions to process, but it does work. I often wonder  what sort of infrastructure and hosting is in their cloud, but on the whole it works and if the cloud is not there, I'm able to work locally anyway.

The interface is well designed and intuitive to follow. Not too many shortcoming, although I'd like to know more on the cloud sync particularly from a security perspective (is the transmission over SSL, is the cloud storage encrypted, etc).  I'm using it side by side with Jumsoft Money, having not decided to make the clean break yet. Time will tell.

If you want to get a closer look at the features of MoneyWiz, MacStories ran a useful post a a while back.  I certainly think it's worth a closer look.