Moneydance vs ynab software#
Moneydance vs ynab plus#

I canвЂ™t really know how much IвЂ™ll spend on the enterainment subcategories of movies vs. But for irregular stuff, like entertainment, clothing or children, I really just want to budget at the parent category. For regular expenses, like utilities and taxes, sure, I could make it work. For budgeting, however, this low level of detail mostly sucks. This detail is great for tracking expenses because I can always choose to sum up my subcategories if necessary. This could help me to make a decision down the road to cancel my phone service if itвЂ™s getting too expensive.

Moneydance vs ynab plus#

I want to know exactly how much my phone provider is charging me plus whatever fees IвЂ™m incurring on top of it. Same with Entertainment ( Entertainment:Concerts, Entertainment:Parties, Entertainment:Bars, etc.) I do this because I want to be able to track these expenses down to a very detailed level. I also do this for other categories, such as Utilities:Telephone:Taxes and Fees. Then, under that, more: Tax:Brian:Federal and Tax:Brian:State, and Tax:Brian:Social Security, and so on. For example, Tax:Brian, Tax:Traci, Tax:Personal Propery. For example, instead of a single Tax category, IвЂ™ll create multiple subcategories beneath it. A new line will appear at the bottom of the list (youвЂ™ll probably have to scroll to the bottom of the screen to see it). To add categories to the budget, just click the plus sign. This is accomplished by clicking the minus sign at the bottom left of the window. The first thing I did with my auto-generated budget was to remove virtually all the child categories (more on this below). Moneydance will fill in the amounts for you, for all categories and their subcategories that had income or expense in the past 12 months. I set my budgets up monthly, for the most part, so I chose that option. In this example IвЂ™ll set the start date of the budget to and choose the last 12 months as my example date range. Since I have a lot of categories, I let Moneydance create my budget for me by clicking the вЂњCalculateвЂќ button. To create a budget you first choose вЂњBudget ManagerвЂќ from the вЂњToolsвЂќ menu. ItвЂ™s also a good idea to first read the instructions for the budgeting component of Moneydance, located here. Hopefully you also have at least a few subcategories set up too.

Moneydance vs ynab software#

Also, this article assumes that you have a working knowledge of the software for example, you have one or more accounts set up and have entered transactions that are assigned to one or more categories. That said, if you find that this information is helpful then all the better. First though a bit of a disclaimer: this isnвЂ™t intended to be a tutorial per se rather this is an account of how I use the software. So I thought IвЂ™d give MoneydanceвЂ™s budgeting features a go and see what happened. I toyed with budgeting in Quicken a few years back but back then I was trying to budget each subcategory and, since I have so many, I found that difficult and ultimately useless. Part of that quest has been to set a budget and stick to it. Since then IвЂ™ve been on sort of a quest to fix our finances. I recently switched from Quicken 2009 to Moneydance 2010 back in February of this year.