Mac Apps
After reviewing Cha-Ching a few weeks ago, I thought it was only fair to take a look at another popular financial application for the Mac: iBank. Although it doesn’t sport a cute piggy bank icon, iBank has an impressive feature set and an award-winning user interface design.
This review will provide an overview of the features offered by iBank, highlight how to import transactions, showcase a the graph functionality, and also explain how the application connects to MobileMe for backing up and accessing transactions on-the-go.
Importing & Transactions
One of the main barriers to using desktop financial management software is the need to manually import each transaction. iBank does everything possible to make this process simple. You can either connect directly to your bank for downloading transactions (if listed as a supported bank), or login through iBank’s integrated web browser to download a Microsoft Money or Quicken file for import.
Once downloaded, you can assign transactions to a category. These come with great looking high-resolution icons to make the whole process more enjoyable:
Transaction List
By default, iBank uses your native OS X system currency. However, you can easily add other currencies to iBank and assign them to your accounts as needed. Transferring between them will even download and use the latest exchange rates.
After all your financial data has been imported (you can go back as far as you’d like), iBank really comes into its own. A range of tools are available for running reports, forecasting, budgets, and tracking where all your money has disappeared to!
You can also deal with scheduled transactions, and iBank will alert you when they are due to be taken from (or sent to) your account. This functionality also connects to iCal.
Investments & Savings
If you have an investment portfolio, iBank can be particularly useful for calculating how your stocks, shares, bonds, mutual funds and indices are performing. The software connects to the internet to download share quote statistics and will tell you how much money you’ve made (or, more likely, lost) on a particular investment:
Portfolio Tracking
Graphs & Reporting
iBank has some pretty nifty functionality for graphing different types of transactions and analyzing your financial data. Particularly useful is the inclusion of standard reports such as cash flow, balance sheet, capital gains, and ROI reports. These can save a great deal of time for you or your accountant.
Graph Tools
Although iBank states that charts are “beautiful”, I would really appreciate a few more options for adjusting the background color and removing the superfluous reflection underneath. The design of the charts feels a little out of place. I do, however, like the animation features – graphs spin and re-draw in an impressive fashion.
Budgeting support is also helpful, allowing you to set goals for your income and expenses over a specified time period. iBank can then monitor progress as you go along based on imported transactions. You can set multiple budgets for different goals (e.g. “spend no more than $50 on eating out this month”).
I was fascinated to discover that iBank has a set of fully configurable templates for you to print your own cheques directly from the app. Obviously you need to have the appropriate cheque templates, paper and equipment to do so.
MobileMe Integration & iPhone Syncing
The latest versions of iBank are starting to utilize MobileMe very effectively, both for allowing you to access information on-the-go, and for backing up data.
iBank can be set to automatically upload a backup of your database to MobileMe each time you launch the application. This is a great way to add peace of mind, especially when dealing with important financial information. It’s also possible to post your investment portfolios to your MobileMe account and check their performance from any web browser.
iBank for iPhone
If you use an iPhone, a companion application is available through the App Store which can sync with iBank over Wi-Fi, MobileMe, or any other WebDAV server. It’s a full featured application both for viewing account data and entering new transactions.
Conclusion
iBank combines a robust feature set, simple interface and streamlined import process to create a very attractive financial application. At $59 it doesn’t come cheap, but is competitively priced for the functionality offered. My only gripe is with the presentation of charts and graphs which I believe could be more subtle (though that’s certainly personal preference).
You’ll be pleased to know that we have a competition to win a copy coming in two days time, so stay tuned via Twitter or RSS for more information about how to enter.
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After reviewing Cha-Ching a few weeks ago, I thought it was only fair to take a look at another popular financial application for ...
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Great review. Seems to be just what I’m looking for. Now to see if it will support my bank…(had plenty of problems in that area before).
Just want to add that iBank DOES work properly with Regions. (When almost every other app I have tried doesn’t. Including Mint.)
This looks great but no OFX integration for Australian Banks, it seems like all AU banks dont support Direct Connection/OFX.
I prefer Money by Jumsoft. It’s cheaper and better looking I think.
Or… just use Mint with Fluid.app. It’s 100% free and has a very nice iPhone app.
It sucks that it doesn’t work in the UK otherwise I’d be using Mint. :(
Mint + Fluid = Awesome
A free and local solution would be nice! I’ve been looking for one! :)
@Matt: so does this mean we can’t use it in Australia? Everytime I read about finance apps I’m wondering in what countries and with what banks this actually works. I’ve got accounts in Australia and Germany….
Looks good. I’ll give it a try.
I like iBank a lot. It’s got great support for multiple currencies which I need as an American living in Ireland. I only have two major gripes:
1) You must click the save button in order to save a transaction. If you try to click away from the transaction when it’s in edit mode, the area annoyingly blinks orange, reminding you to save. Can’t this just be auto saved when you click away?
2) I’ve yet to figure out how to do reports across currencies. For example, I like to see how much I spend on groceries. I generate a report and view the transactions for my grocery category. The problem is if I set my currency to Euro, it only displays euro transactions and vice versa for USD. iBank do a great job of converting currencies, it would be great if they carried that over to reporting aswell.
Other than that, it’s a really solid and feature filled app. The closest competitor is Jumsoft’s Money in my opinion but I found a few bugs in their software regarding reporting with multiple currencies. Their customer service was really nice and helpful but I couldn’t use their program in that state.
they bank, you bank, we all bank with ibank!
I need this so I can watch how much poorer I am every day. Right now according to my calculations I am financially OK up until the age 77. But I have iBank, I can pinpoint more accurately when I go broke, So I can have a party the day before I do….
“…nd you can take that to the bank!” ~ – Baretta (Robert Blake)
Great review. Seems to be just what I’m looking for
iBank says:
“You must first select a financial instituion with which to connect your account. When you create an account, iBank will initiate this process automatically”
Not from where I’m sitting. No automatic anything and no obvious way to select a financial institution. Glad I didn’t pay for it before trying it out.
I’ve been looking for a replacement for Quicken for Mac 2006. This might be a candidate but I’m also checking out some of the free/cheap alternatives like mint.com and Jumsoft’s money.
I’m hoping my credit union, which isn’t on iBank’s list, might work anyway. It does integrate directly with either Microsoft Money or Quicken.
A few concerns:
1) I have years of old data in Quicken that I imagine it would be difficult, or for practical purposes impossible, to migrate to any other application. QIF file export/import doesn’t cut it with me.
2) The way my credit union works, once you’ve downloaded a transaction you can never download it again–unless you contact them to reset your download history. That would make moving even my recent history into another application.
3) Each and every debit card transaction downloaded from my CU begins the payee field with fixed text along the lines of “DEBIT CARD TRANSACTION” followed with the actual payee. This makes auto-classification in Quicken almost impossible, and complicates using the transaction registers too. Maybe iBank might have a better way of dealing with this?
Has anyone been using the iBank/iBiz combo? What do you think? I started using iBiz this year and to me it’s just ok. But if the two programs make a powerful combination, I’ll consider sticking with it and trying them out together.
What year was this review published? Thanks :)
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Thank you.Kinga