“Mature” is an appropriate description of Mac Money 3.0, the latest upgrade to a program that started out “pretty darn good,” MacMoney is a financial manager that gathers its data primarily from your checkbook entries. This update includes 11 major changes and a few more minor, cosmetic modifications.
Each MacMoney entry is assigned to 1 of up to 250 categories, such as bank accounts, expenses, income, assets, credit cards, cash, or liabilities. Using information gleaned from your checks and deposit slips, the system produces a variety of reports and graphs such as balance sheets, financial reports, transaction activity reports, and income and expense statements.
Like many people, I keep an investment/money-market-type account in addition to a regular checking account, Where I ran into problems using the previous version of MacMoney was in transferring funds from one checking account to another. If I entered the transaction in both accounts (one was a deposit, the other a withdrawal), the balances in both accounts ended up severely out of whack. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who had this complaint, because Version 3.0 now records both transactions so that they appear on the check registers of both accounts. So now when I deposit funds from another checkbook, the transaction shows up on the other account, where I can edit it as needed.
Another major improvement is that MacMoney now sorts registers (lists of checks and deposits) either by transaction date or by check/deposit number. This helps quite a bit when items are out of sync chronologically — something that happens to me quite often.
MacMoney's third improvement is in assigning budgets. You can select the Enter Balances button from the Category menu to display last year’s budget for comparison with the current year’s.
Other changes include two new default categories: Delete and Void. In previous versions, once you entered a transaction, it was there forever. You could change the amount to zero, but the transaction had to be assigned to a category. I used Misc.In and Misc.Out as my dumping grounds.
The new Preferences screen customizes input and output, including the way items are sorted in the register and the position of the cursor when you enter transactions (date or name/ source, for example).
Running on a Macintosh II, MacMoney produces graphs in color. It displays the checks in yellow, cash receipts in green, and credit cards in red. All data entered with earlier versions of MacMoney are compatible with Version 3.0.
MacMoney's newest documentation is an improvement over the previous manual, but it still misses the mark. First, the reference section has been organized according to MacMoney's menus and submenus. This may be logical, but it requires you to memorize the menu in order, which just doesn’t work for me. Also, the pages have no headers, so you can’t just flip through to find a topic. Finally, the index doesn’t match the text exactly — it’s often off by a page.
What the documentation needs, even more than better organization, is more information about how to use MacMoney to handle routine problems such as withholding. I finally decided to enter the total amount of the deductions as a cash deposit and then subtract each deduction as a separate cash transaction. After all these years of using MacMoney and its predecessors, I still don’t use the assets and liabilities sections effectively.
As good as MacMoney is — and it continues to be the most powerful and easy-to-use program of its type that I’ve seen — there are still areas for improvement. In some future version, I’d like to be able to add a memo for each item in a split transaction. Also, although I’m glad I can “unsplit” a transaction, I’d like to be able to go back and split a transaction after it’s been saved. I’d also like to be able to choose which data the system should use for budget totals when I start a new year. But despite some heavy competition, MacMoney continues to grow and mature into a worthwhile personal finance program. Now, if it could only beep when I enter an incorrect amount from my checkbook...
Walker, Bonnie. (July 1988). MacMoney. MacUser. (pgs. 108, 110).
Mike Farmer
Applications
out of 10 (1 vote)
66 / 
2015-08-13 / 
2024-03-19 / 
30cb77f4f4101b9fc112bf156be24b32125dfb83 / 
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MacMoney.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Mini vMac
