Our "TopTenREVIEWS Bronze Award" winner, AceMoney from MechCAD, is one of the best personal finance products around, but was just barely edged out by Moneydance, due its more advanced features, credit union support, and useful extensions. AceMoney is a super-user-friendly product that offers some good features for the price. We especially liked an account overview feature that allows you to see all of your money at once—your accounts, your investments, even what you owe on credit cards.
AceMoney was easy to install, and even easier to use. It's not difficult to figure out what you need to do to access your portfolio, schedule bills and deposits, or run reports, to name a few. AceMoney also supports importing data in a large number of formats, including qif, ofx, ofc, qfx, and xml, so even if AceMoney can't automatically update your account information, it can read files your bank exports.
AceMoney offers features that help you to reconcile accounts and do your banking online through transfers, deposits and so forth.
However, we were disappointed that only a few banks and no credit unions are compatible with their software. This limits the number of people that can use AceMoney's online banking feature.
AceMoney has about nine different reports available, making it possible for you to review the progress of your finances and make necessary adjustments.
We felt some of the other finance products included better reporting features.
AceMoney has a very limited financial planning section integrated into their software, which only includes a refinance, loan, and savings calculator—allowing you to see what your payments will be for the duration of the loan.
We feel that planning is an important part of personal finance, which is why AceMoney scored so low in this area.
AceMoney exports to qif, xml, txt, and csv format, so if your tax software imports any of those formats, it should work fine (check with your tax software vendor to be sure). If your tax software doesn't import any of those formats, then you'll have to manually enter your data. Other than that, AceMoney does not offer options like categorizing transactions as deductible, or aid in findiing deductions, like Quicken Starter Edition does. Manually entering your data can be time-consuming and increases the chance for errors.
AceMoney has a portfolio manager for all of your retirement accounts, but the program doesn't have the ability to download stock quotes or research stocks. If you like to trade your stocks or monitor their growth, a different product might be better for you.
AceMoney is decent personal finance software and has room for improvement. The bottom line-AceMoney is extremely easy to navigate but lacks many of the important features our top rated products include. If you're looking for no-frills personal finance software, AceMoney is for you. If you want Online Banking, make sure AceMoney can connect to your bank account first.

Ask & Answer