Looking for Mac OS X personal finance software

I’m pretty, ahem, dedicated to keeping our finances up to date and accounted for, and traditionally have used MS Money on Windows for this purpose. Say what you like about Microsoft (I’m not their biggest fan, to say the least) but Money is an app that works well and is pretty simple to use. I started with Money 98 in 1998, then upgraded to Money 2000 two years later.

The thing is that we now use our iMac for 99.99% of our computer work, and it would be really handy to have a finance app on the Mac that works, conceptually at least, like Money. There is no shortage of accounting software for the Mac, of varying quality, but no big players are in the market. Intuit pulled out of the UK Mac market a few years ago (pre-OS X) and have just recently pulled Quicken out of the UK Windows (and therefore the UK as a whole) market as well.

I can’t believe that I’m the only one who needs personal financial software as a Mac user. I know there’s MYOB(Mind Your Own Business), and I’ve downloaded a trial version, but it seems much more business- than personal-focused.

Over the course of the next few weeks I am aiming to do a group test of various OS X personal finance apps, both freeware and shareware, that I have discovered.

So far my list consists of:

• Accounts by Nano Software
• Budget by Snowmint Creative Solutions
• Cashbox by Whitney Young
• Checkbook.html by Splasm Software
• Cocoa Account Plus by Tony S Wu
• Conto by Nicola Vitacolonna
• Economix X by Yannick Callaud
• Finance (if I can get a non-corrupt .sit archive)
• Gnucash (downloading via Fink as I type this)
• Grisbi (if I can discover how to install the .deb under OS X — anyone help?)
• iBal
• iBank
• iCash
• KuConta by Kualo Software
• Money by Jumsoft
• Phobos

I’m confident that I can whittle these down pretty quickly to a much shorter list, as I have quite particular requirements:

• Categories, not accounts, for income & expense categorisation. I’m not a trained accountant — all that double-entry stuff leaves me a bit cold…
• Similar look and feel to MS Money/Quicken.
• Easy setup of accounts.
• Loan amortisation functionality: input the interest rate, length of term, payment etc and have it work out the missing info.
• Support for investments, credit cards and liabilities as well as regular current/savings accounts.
• Budgeting.
• Something like Money’s Debt Planner.
• Reporting.

Not much to ask, is it? I just want Microsoft to port Money to the Mac, really. I imagine that would be one step too far for the Mac Business Unit, though ;)

• computing