AAUG Reviews

by Ron Schoedel, AAUG Member

iBank is touted as being “Beautiful, intuitive, powerful…the way Mac applications should be”, by it’s developer, IGG Software. The program won an Apple Design Award in 2007 for Best Leopard Application (Runner up). I am a long-timer user of Quicken, and a former full-time user of MoneyDance, which I used for a few years while Quicken was particularly awful. But once I saw iBank, I saw another opportunity to dump Quicken. I will not elaborate on the many reasons why one might search out a replacement for the venerable mainstay of consumer accounting software, but I will admit that I am one of many Mac users who just doesn’t much care for Quicken, even if I have to use it every day.

Here’s my review in one sentence, if you have no time to read further: If you are just getting started tracking your finances on your Mac, and have no prior investment in financial software, and no data to import: BUY iBANK IMMEDIATELY. Don’t waste any time. You will like it. It is slick, attractive, and fully capable of tracking your accounts, whether they are checking, cash, loans, credit cards, stocks, IRAs and even accounts that are denominated in currencies other than your primary currency. All of the necessary features are present. Split transactions, powerful searching and reporting tools, filtering, memorized transactions, scheduled bills, as well as the nice touch of allowing you to put a reminder on your iCal for coming due items.

One of the nicest “ooh ahh” traits of iBank is its quite stunning graphs and charts. If you’re going to be looking at a visual representation of your financial data, it does not have to be boring and 80s-like in appearance. iBank trumps Quicken’s old-fashioned looking 2-D graphs and charts with colorful 3-D charts and graphs.

iBank’s integration of the CoverFlow technology is cool, too. At first I thought it would mostly be one of those fluffy features, more eye candy than utility. But I realized that Cover Flow as a means of browsing your transactions is useful. Just like flipping through album art in iTunes or Finder previews of your images and documents, iBank lets you flip through your transactions, each of which is represented by a catagory icon that makes it immediately obvious what kind of transaction it is. It’s easy to thumb through the checkbook (so to speak) and find that gift transaction I am looking for, because it is represented by a pretty blue box with a bow on it. Way easier than trying to remember the vendor name or amount. The Cover Flow icons are all nicely designed, too.

Speaking of searching for transactions, iBank uses Spotlight, with a built-in spotlight search bar right in the main application window, to give quick access to your data.

Online banking is integrated into the iBank experience, also. In fact, iBank sports an integrated web browser, to allow you easy access in a tabbed window to switch between your iBank data file and your bank account as viewed online in the browser. Using my Wells Fargo checking account and online access, I browsed to the download transactions button, and it immediately popped open the Import Transactions screen in iBank. There was no need to hunt for a downloaded file or perform a separate import act. That’s very cool. And iBank was even smart enough to know which of the transactions in the date range offered by the bank had already been entered into my account. A big thumbs up to iBank for making importing from online banking as easy as it probably can ever be.

All in all, the operation of iBank, the searches, entering data: very smooth; I have no complaints at all. I especially like the one-line view where I can easily see each transaction on a single line, and the drop-down menu that exists on each transaction line to enter categories. That is much faster than Quicken, which requires me to click each transaction and navigate to the category field. Entering transactions in iBank is also a few notches above Quicken, and I especially love the ample Notes field that I can populate with my musings and ramblings on each transaction. Quicken limits me to just barely a few words; not iBank.

With the advent of Applications on the iPhone, I have been looking for a finance software package that allows me to enter transactions on my iPhone and then sync up with my computer’s data file, as well as view account balances and transactions on the phone. So far, to my knowledge, iBank is the only software package that offers such integration. This is done by way of a web app, that you store on your MobileMe iDisk (yes, it requires MobileMe), and then access through Mobile Safari on the iPhone. The promise of iPhone support is exciting, but in practice I found that transactions I entered on the phone didn’t always sync up. The iPhone web app is nicely designed, and simple to use. The success rate for transactions actually being saved was about 50%. At the very least though, the home screen always showed the correct balances for my accounts, and the most recent several transactions for each of them. I will give this iPhone integration some time to mature. The mere fact that it even exists shows that IGG is thinking ahead and clearly trying to deliver what the market is looking for.

iBank also includes a budget widget and a transaction entry widget. These are nice in that it is very quick to just pop into Dashboard to enter a transaction, without launching the full iBank application. The widgets perform as expected, allowing you to create transactions, view balances, and view your budget in several different ways (percentages, dollars, various time spans, etc.).

So, I believe it is well established that iBank as an accounting package for home users will meet most people’s needs and wants.

Now, I realize that many of us have tons of pre-existing data from prograns such as Quicken or MS Money, and switching accounting software is not easy. It can actually be downright scary to have to learn new software. But being able to at least smoothly transfer your data takes away a lot of the pain. iBank 3 comes to the table promising the ability to import QIF, OFX, QFX, and CSV files, which is a must for anyone who wants to switch. The wide range of import choices means you should be able to get your data between programs just fine.

I mentioned I have ten years of Quicken data. I have numerous accounts, with transfers between them, many times, over the years. New accounts opened, old accounts closed, and so forth. The test of whether or not I could adopt iBank as my everyday finance manager would be whether I could successfully import this complex data file from Quicken to iBank, without having to do much manual tweaking of it. To make sure I did it right, I consulted the Help menu and was guided step by step from Exporting out of Quicken, to the set up of my iBank file and the import of my old data. It took a moment or two, and then I was totally surprised when everything except one transfer transaction (from a cash account to a checking account) came across correctly. One transaction out of thousands was wrong, and it was corrected by me manually within seconds. I am sold. My only complaint was that when viewing “all transactions”, iBank slowed considerably in its scrolling speed and ability to select transactions. I solved this by viewing only “this year” transactions.

iBank is the new standard for banking on the Mac. Quicken has not released an update in two years. It remains to be seen what Intuit will do in the next year. If you are just getting started managing finances, don’t even worry about what the big boys are doing. Jump right in to iBank. If you are tired of Quicken, you will quickly come to like iBank. It is easy to learn, comes with a solid 352-page help manual (PDF), and you’ll be up and running in minutes. IGG has shown promising growth in the development of this software, judging by the new feature lists on their website between version 3 and the earlier versions. The iPhone component will become a stable and useful tool, I am certain, as time goes by. iBank really feels like it belongs on the Mac, and it does. iBank has earned the spot on my dock where a Quicken icon used to be.