MoneyWell App Reviews

Works well for managing and tracking home budget (replaced Quicken). It automatically imports all my banks data (I have to log online first), and display clear graphs. Interface is easy to use.

Over the years, I have used many accounting apps and found they crash or interface is clumsy and confusing. I settled on Moneywell when it first appeared and have never thought of other apps since. Moneywell is so stable, so intuitive, so easy to use. I see a couple of reviewers saying they could not work out how to use the program, even after watching the video tutorials or it kept crashing. I have to wonder what they are doing - my experience has been the direct opposite and the video tutorials are great. Customer Service is excellent, but rarely needed. Moneywell also offers the ability to budget - very important for many folk and reports are a breeze. if you wish more detailed reporting than Moneywell offers, you simply paste your selected information into an Excel or other spreadsheet and then have full control over your analysis. I recommend and demonstrate Moneywell to my clients, who wish to generate added income for their later years. I wish Moneywell had an affiliate program, as I would subscribe and generate added income for myself!

Save your money on this for now. This app has efficitively been abandoned, and the updates it has received have been half hearted “fixes” to keep it on life support. The creator has left the company to work with Apple, and has done all its users a great disservice by leaving it in the hands of an amateur. No meaningful updates in years. Not even desinged for Yosemite, nevermind support for El Capitan. The iPhone app hasn’t been updated in over 2 years, and doesn’t even work on iOS 9. It still has an iOS 6 design. Good luck even getting support if you need help. This app should sell for 99¢ given its relative value. Save your money and more importantly, stop entering your data in an app that has not shown any real sign that it has a future.

I’ve used different approaches to managing personal finances. I’ve tried out several Apps and MoneyWell is the most fun. It organizes all your accounts, transactions, budget categories, and reports neatly into 1 window. Moneywell focuses on planning, being proactive in managing money as opposed to being retrospective (relying on reporting). I don’t have any issues using this App on El Capitan with my iMacs. MoneyWell also has sibling Apps for the iPhone/iPod and iPad that work well in iOS 9. I’ve been a happy MoneyWell customer for years and I wish to continue doing so for years to come.

As N4 Player wrote back in October, this appears to be “ABANDONWARE”. A major update was promised for Dec., 2015 but half way through March, 2016 there is still nothing. To make matters worse, the update is a ‘paid update’ and La Coste was selling the updates at a discount. Pity anyone who purchased it. Also, there are serious sync problems with the iOS versions on both iPad and iPhone but La Coste considers this to be a lower priority that the OSX update so won’t be addressed until the OSX update is completed. Bottom line? DO NOT PURCHASE at this point in time.

Such a huge disappointment. I was looking for a slightly more economical financial management suite, so I skipped Quicken and had a look at Moneywell. I loved the idea of a virtual envelope budgeting program, so I was quite excited to download Moneywell from the App Store. Apparently, the software doesn’t know how to sync with Canadian banks, which makes the program completely useless to me. Yes, Moneywell developers, there are massive, highly organized banks OUTSIDE of the USA that should not be an afterthought, especially at the price you’re charging. I’ve requested a refund.

A bit of a learning curve at first to use this software, but one I had it all set up, it seemed to work pretty well .. until I started finding bugs in the system. 1. The dates will display inaccurately many time and it’s almost impossible to fix, as it keeps jumping back to the same wrong date. 2. Synchronization is great .. when it works. I use it on my iPhone as does my wife and we have it install on our macbook pro. There have been some major data losses and a huge waste of time fixing it because somehow the sync process overwrites stuff - a lot! I think this should be a great program if they get their bugs sorted out and make the system more reliable.

Spent all day setting up MoneyWell, then it crashed, and continued to crash on re-launch. I manually deleted all MoneyWell files from ~/Library/ and then MoneyWell did launch, but the developer did not implement auto-save, so I lost a lot of data. Spending $50 on buggy software is bad enough, but I lost half a day of my time, which I will never get back.

When MoneyWell 2.0 came out, I fell in love with the "inverted" envelope system they offered, and accepted the flaws and bugs in the app because I had the patience and technical wherewithal to work around them. I couldnt recommend the app to my mom and girlfriend. 2.0.2 removed a lot of the bugs, but still had some confusing UX elements. Most of those have gone with 2.1, and I am now fully urging my family members to buy and use the app (the sale through 7 August is only icing on the persuasion cake!). The "unified view" of all accounts and buckets in the sidebar makes it much faster to switch between categories, and I really love the new interactive bucket fill process, with a sheet that comes down to show you what events are about to be filled, and allows you to alter the fill if your priorities are a little different than those of the default fill order--now you can choose to fill your rent bill before the cable TV bill thats coming due on the same day! Simply put, I love the envelope system, but was always frustrated by other apps that allowed you to prescribe a certain amount per week/month for a given budget, but provided little help when it was clear you were grossly overspending or underaccounting for expenses. This resulted in too much budget tweaking and frustration. Being able to build up my monthly budget by describing how often I, say, go out to eat and how much I typically spend (say, $3.50 for lunch on MTWF each week, and $12 on Thursday when I go out with friends) and deriving a budget from that (then realize Im spending a lot per month, and tweaking my budget down by making myself reduce or cut out invidivual events) is a lot more useful to me--instead of budgeting $200 for gas each month then grimacing when I go over, I can note that I typically buy $35 of gas each time I stop (typically once a week), and can tweak how many times I stop in a month, or how much I buy at once to quickly change my budget as I limit travel or the price of gas changes. Its great. Im withholding my fifth star for two lacking use cases, which are secondary to the main app, but I feel I would use on a regular basis. Firstly, Id like a type of bucket geared around a savings goal. Instead of saying "I plan to go on vacation once per year and spend $5000, so break that up by month", Id like to say "Im saving up $7000 for an engagement ring that I want to buy by next February. Im putting X in per paycheck; will I hit my goal ahead of schedule? When will I hit $7000 at my current rate?" I can of course do this with a calculator, but that can technically be said with most of the features of this app--the value comes from the app making my job easier than a calculator or spreadsheet would. Being able to increase and decrease my contributions towards various goals on the fly would be greatly useful. I know theyre working on this feature, so consider the fifth star a ransom until they give it to me :) The other missing feature for me is probably much easier to cover (and about which Ill be posting on the support forums)--I can add E*Trade to my MoneyWell file, at which point it will monitor monetary transactions (basically, the sweep account in E*Trade), and it even knows that I have a particular stock in my account, listing the symbol in my "Securities" section in the sidebar. It doesnt, however, seem to acknowledge any quantities transactions or transactions of shares of those securities, however. I can see the money leave my sweep account when I buy a stock, but no shares are added to my securities page. Likewise, I cant seem to find a way to manually enter the number of shares I own, or record transactions of securities. I dont think this would cause me to withhold that fifth star if the savings goal feature is added, but its certainly a contributing factor to the rating. The only other minor problem I have is that the center view on the screen (the transaction list and graph) dont always update when I change buckets or accounts in the sidebar. This is an existing issue, but seems to be much less common in this version (Ive only had it happen a handful of times over the many weeks Ive been using the 2.1 beta). Its not so confusing to me, and at worse I can still save the file and restart the app with no harm done, but I imagine this would be very frustrating for the typical user, in the rare occasion that it happens. All of that said, NoThirst makes it a point to respond to threads on their support forum as quickly as possible, have been very friendly and other users on the board are extremely helpful too if they happen to know the answer before a support person can get to you; major points for the whole support process as I wrestled with the first few versions of the app. All in all, a very solid app that reimagines a decades-old but still well loved budgeting method, turning it on its head so you can describe your expenditures and make the computer do the planning for you.

Ive used Moneywell since about version 1.5 and have been very pleased with it. I used to use Quicken, but I got tired of the lack of support for the Macintosh platform and the finagling I had to do in order to apply the envelope budgeting method. Moneywell has perfectly implemented the envelope method and has been very easy for me to use. I also use the iPhone app on my wifes phone and on mine and dont have any real trouble keeping them synchronized with our master document on our Mac. This feature works smoothly and reliably in the 2.x versions. I really like the improvements introduced in version 2.1. The graph of a buckets running total helps me see if there are any changes in our trends which may require either spending and/or budgeting adjustments. The event-based budgeting idea (introduced in 2.0) was a stroke of genius because it really helps me break down what expenses are aggregated in a bucket. I only have two issues: 1. I think that the investment transaction support is insufficient. Multiple transactions for the same ticker creates duplicate securities in the securities list and Im not sure why (long term vs. short term holdings?). Also the Portfolio view seems only to add securities transactions and not subtract security sales, e.g. buy 10 shares of XYZ and sell 5 shares of XYZ lists 10+5 shares of XYZ, not 10-5 shares. I would also like the current security price to automatically retrieved in order to indicate its up-to-date value. 2. I like being able to copy transactions from the transaction list directly into a spreadsheet. However, I think this functionality should be extended to bucket transfers as well. Overall, this is excellent software. I highly recommend it. I will be a long term customer. Kudos to the developers.

Long time user of 1.x, upgraded to 2.0 and had my doubts, however, I finally upgraded when 2.1 was released. This is one of the most overlooked financial apps out there. If you are looking for a robust true envelope-style personal finance manager, Moneywell is it. Customer service is fantastic as well. Give it a try!

My original review critical of MoneyWell was based on not being able to auto download from my bank - confirmed only after verifying after purchase, and based on MoneyWells listing stating incompatability with my banks software. It seems MoneyWell shot itself in the foot with an incorrect listing. I changed the configuration and my bank now downloads. You have to mimic (misrepresent) that you are downloading as Quicken for Mac 2007 (their help section suggests telling your bank youre using Quicken because saying "Moneywell" confuses the bank.) However, in calling my bank, they specifically volunteered the product name, MoneyWell, and stated they dont support MoneyWell. It appears theres a lack of bank understanding about these software programs - and my bank is in a major metropolitan area. However, there remains a small issue I will have to further dig into at MoneyWell: each time I open the software, I have to go and hunt in Finder for the file that holds my transactions….its never under Recent files in MoneyWell. I see they offer a 60-day money back guarantee. Based on finally discovering how to mimic another software program to download, as well as MacWorld magazines endorsement of the program, I now change this to a good rating - would be 5 stars if the MoneyWell document of my current accounts opened as default, without having to go find it each time. Now that I see this does indeed auto download, the program does have the value I sought. The concept of divvying-up your income into buckets and then working from there is not as useful to me because I live well below my means, so Im only interested in the tracking of my spending through auto-downloading the bank reports. I can honestly recommend trying this program now, but their help information (regarding auto downloads) is not consistent, and not very clear. Your banking experience may vary in success. …Or not.

I used Moneywell 1.x for a long time even after 2.0 was released due to the feedback that 2.0 users were initially leaving. Once 2.1 was released, I upgraded and really like it. The 2.1 UI is an improvement from 1.x. Kudos for clever features like ignored aliases! Syncing with Moneywell for iPhone is now rock solid. Thanks for all your hard work, No Thirst Software!

Bought this thinking it would replace the quicken essentials, quicken 2007mac, or the iBank software i have used to find a solution that warrants the software solutions available to Windows users. Switched to mac two years ago and continue to be dissapointed in finace software for mac. This is way over priced for the depth it does not provide, does not even calulate loan interest and ammorterization of such loan. Investment portion is terrible. Gues I got spoiled with windows version of finace software and just wish one company would invest in provideding a quality product. Was very intriqued in the bucket concept and the screen shots appear to say it is more powerful than it actually is. Online bank choices are very limited. Wish i could get my money back!!!! STAY AWAY until the improve this basic version, will keep doing updates if they become available. First reveiw ever as I wanted to make sure others do not pay 50 buks for this program!!!!1

I have been looking at different finance apps for mac for a while now and settled on some. On my continued search I found Moneywell. After downloading the trial from the website and using, I then bought on the app store for the easier updates. I am no dummy and I also program databases, but I will admit it took me some time to grasp the concept of how the buckets worked. I knew I was on the right track with this app, so I kept grapsing. Finally it hit me, as clear as day. It is so simple I was overthinking the concept. This is exactly what Ive been looking for for years. The banking downloads and matching works perfectly and the buckets are helping me watch what Im spending down to the penny. I am so precisiely budgeted I cant believe the money Im saving. Thank you for a great product. I was happy to give you the sale.

First: The application quits frequently and unexpectedly during the set up process. One moment you are entering data, the next the program disappears. Second: The application frequently "freezes" the computer, requiring restart---when it freezes, it does not respond to Force Quit. Third: Their support may be "legendary", but one wonders "legendary" where? Slovenia? When you need to refer to information in the support section of their website, you realize how thin the information really is. What happened to PDF manuals? My copy is installed on MacBook Air, running OS 10.8.1

Ive only been using Moneywell for a month (starting with version 2.1). I find the interface clean and quite usuable, albeit a bit sluggish at times with my 14 years of transactions imported from Quicken (successfully, I might add -- other mac finance software always messed up the import, though I did have to give up the brokerage data I had to get a clean import of the bank accounts). I find the companion iPhone app (separate purchase) is essential to getting the most of the budgeting / spending plan tracking, but it has already been able to help us manage our spending. Learning the "cash flow" system and tricks takes some time and dedication - though the videos on the nothirst site and their online knowledge base help tremendously (for example, for dealing with credit cards that have balances). My wife was skeptical at first, but is now tracking spending on her phone and helping us stay within budget. Id recommend this app to anyone looking to more proactively manage spending -- if youre also willing to invest some time learning the software. Im not using the investing "capabilities" of the app, so I cant comment on those. (Those accounts never imported correctly from Quicken so I dont track them in Moneywell at the moment). Direct download from my bank works well. Reports are limited (especially compared to Quicken), statement reconciliation is functional (though I reconcile using direct download several times a week, and its a little tedious for that). But it shines for budgeting and spending plan management.

I had some gripes about 2.0 when it was released, but this latest version (2.1.1) looks pretty darn good. I am making the cut over from 1.7.3 now and moving forward with MoneyWell 2.x. The folks at NoThirst may have stumbled a bit on this release, but it looks like it is shaping up very nicely (many of my complaints from 2.0 have been fixed). Finally, the folks at NoThirst really need an optimized iPad app. I do my finances often by going through receipts while sitting on the couch. I have an iMac on my desk, but I use an iPad instead of a desktop. Lots of folks are looking to iPad for portability rather than MacBook. They really need an iPad app that is fully optimized for the iPad. The 2x version of their iPhone app simply does not cut it.

Great idea from the developers but it is impossible to set up! Way to much of a hassle to even deal with it. And their support staff isnt very helpful either, all they do is refer you to certain articles on their website that you could find yourself. Ultimately, this was the quickest waste of $50 in my life! DO NOT GET THIS APP!

It makes envelope or bucket budgeting much easier. My wife even got on board with the iPhone app.