Banktivity 5 (formerly iBank 5) App Reviews

I have used I-Bank for the past five years, but the new upgrade to Banktivity has exceeded all of my expectations. The App is clear and intuitive. Syncrchronization with all of my different accounts is seamless. This has been the best banking/finance tracking sortware that I have ever used….and I have used them all in the past!

This is a solid home banking/personal finance software. It has all the basics. Maybe its because of my experience with my last software - Prospects - that I am biased as to how these programs should work, but Prospects put everything right on the main page, making it easy to see everything right up front, and run queries, filter transactions, see a pie chart or time-series graph for any or all categories or payees. It was (they are no longer in business) the ultimate in simple user interface and loads of information feedback. iBank provides most of this; however, if it is in different places. If I want to see transactions, the main screen has that (with a token graph in the corner); if I want to see graphs or reports, that is in another place. The reports are done in a very polished form, but are presented as if I planned to print them out. Is that really needed? To their credit, the reports are full of hyperlinks, allowing you to drill down by clicking on the link, say by category, and see graphs, summary tables, and, at the deepest level, the individual transactions. Don’t get me wrong, it all works - and works pretty well, but the delivery is somewhat cumbersome in my opinion. What I don’t like are the transaction import rules/algorithms. I think the idea is to move the complicated import routines behind the scences. Trouble is, they don’t work as often as they do work - so, while you can open the import “templates”, I can’t figure out how to modify them. And there does not appear to be a way to set up an import rule that applies an Payee only, without applying a category (e.g. Walmart - might be groceries, micellaneous, or split with cash withdrawal, or any of a number of other categories). Finally, import of transfers is maddeningly incompetent. I find my templates and import rules hiding transfers in all kinds accounts requiring me to scrutinize every transaction after every import. I spend way more time reviewing imports than I should!!!

I’ve been using iBank for 2 years now. I liked it at first until I ran into numerous bugs. Contacting their support staff didn’t help as they told me these were not bugs but features. I guess their people come from Microsoft. I upgraded to v5 hoping bugs would be gone. They are still there, unsurprisingly. And I had to pay the full price (not the upgrade price) as they rip off customers who purchase apps through the app store (only people who buy the app from them direct can benefit from the upgrade price. Because of the convenience and safety of the app store I prefer to buy it here. I contacted the support once again to ask for help but ended up being threatened by their staff including the CEO. I would love to move away from it but their export tool doesn’t work (most probably one feature). To avoid at all costs

Full of bugs, close at each 20 minutes. Ridiculous. Automatic deletes several transactions without any warning. The functionality "transaction templates" made me loose a lot of time. You guys got to fix this POOR application! Every month when I try to close my monthly balance is the same thing. I spent HOURS trying just to import data from my bank… Lotado de bugs, fecha a cada 20 minutos. Ridículo. Deleta automaticamente várias trnasações sem nenhum aviso. A funcionalidade “transaction templates”me fez perder muito tempo. And this should be done by a simply mouse click. Vocês têm que corrigir essa aplicação. Todo mês quando tento fechar meu balanço mensal é a mesma coisa. Gasto HORAS tentando simplesmente importar dados do meu banco… Quando isto deveria ser feito através de um simples botão.

It used to work, now it keeps crashing every time at startup. Not compatible with OS X El Capitan. The thing is, my whole financial life relies on this software, now I have to go back to pen and paper. I hope they update soon.

I have tried a lot of these expenses apps - but iBank is the perfect app to manage your expenses. easy to use, quick entries, quick reports.

I had the old IBank 2008. Wow the update was worth the money. I updated operating systems so decided to update iBank and just love it. I am currently retired and it does everything and more. I don’t use 1/2 of the program but I am happy happy. I am not sure what happened to the old accounts from the old iBank but at this point it does not matter:)

I just started using iBank about a month ago and find the learning curve to be fairly easy after using another product for about a year. Granted I don’t use all of iBanks features but the transactions that I have been processing have worked flawlessly. The user manual that can be accessed from the help menu is very friendly and informative. So far I am happy with the product.

In general iBank meets my needs, simple as they are. The area that does not seem to be addressed is encryption of the data file. Even with the file on my iMac I feel very uncomfortable with the fact that iBank does not encrypt it. I tried to submit this as an enhancement suggestion, however I could not do so at the captcha font was totally illegible so I had no idea of what to type in!

I find this application to be very much underpowered. It’s graphics are poor and it does not provide any method for a do-it-yourself investor to analysis a portfolio. I am thinking here about P/E ratios, yields, etc. Also, it has an American focus on financal reporting in that it uses terms like “short term capital gains”. Short term gain profits are no different than long term gain profits where I live (Canada). I think the lack of good quality financial software packages on the Apple products is a real bugaboo. Many people, espeically retired people, have to monitor their financial holdings more carefully than this software package allows.

Ive used Quicken for years and continued to use it with VMFusion when I migrated to a Mac. When I got a second computer I decided it wasnt worth a 2nd license of VMWare and a Windows license so I decided to try out iBank. My PC-based quicken data migrated over flawlessly and iBank 5 has all of the functionality I need with a much better integration with my banks and great reporting options.

I haven’t felt this in control of our finances since Microsoft Money. I like being able to set up extra accounts like envelopes in order to put money aside for saving purposes. This is the best household finance app I have used, and I have tried many. The only thing I would like to see would be a forecaster, in order to see how much money we will have left over after everything for the month ahead has been paid.

The time and money this app has saved us is huge. Amazing tool for a small business. We use it to pull data from 2 business visas and a chequing account. The only shortfall is when it comes to cheques and figuring out who they were made out to and where to post to.

This version does not work with Yosemite Beta version, although the developer webiste has no mention of that. Contacted Customer support via chat, without resolution and had to ask Apple for a refund, which was processed quickly. Works wonderful on Maverick … great product. Hopefully a fix would be coming in soon for Yosemite ...

I have been a long time user of both Quicken and Quickbooks and prior to Quicken used MS Money for several years, all on Windows. I have several years of transactions on Quicken and was apprehensive about the conversion. It went like a charm. After three months of use including a week on Yosemite, I find the product very stable other than misaligned graphics on the account list since upgrading to released version of Yosemite. This is an inconvenience and not a real problem. I prefer to import transactions from my banks via Safari and then apply them as a Quicken file to iBank. That way I sign in and control my banking passwords. Call me paranoid and I will agree. This is fast and trouble free and when the file does contain duplicates iBank has no problem separating the new from the duplicates. As a Canadian user who spends several months each year in the US, I appreciate the ability to handle accounts in both currencies. My initial impression of the reporting was that it was rather basic but after a few months I have realized that I have yet to think of a report that I couldn’t get from the existing features. I just had to think about my question in a slightly different way than I did with Quicken. I have not fully exploited the investment tracking yet but that is an issue with my prior manual record keeping and not the software. I will be moving on to the investments next. Before retiring I spent much of my career evaluating application software for clients. I give iBank high marks for completeness of features, intuitive use, clean presentation and reliability. Overall excellent software and a good value

Disappointed with this app. I used MS Money for years and thought iBank would be a good replacement. I was wrong! iBank is so much more complicated and less user friendly. I wish Microsoft would bring back MS Money and update it for Mac users. If you do buy iBank 5, good luck setting up mutual funds, I’ve watched the tutorials and attempted to add- frustratingly complicated. And by the way: can you offer a Canadian version? It’s spelt cheque NOT check!

I used Quicken for years. I think Quicken’s Report is better than iBank. I focus on Investment. I hope that: 1) It should be able to input security price in the "Investment Acount report view”, as today’s price of the security. Although, you should still keep the securities view’s input as advance input method for modifying special day price and so on. 2) The “Account Value” graphic report of Investment Account should show a line of cost base combined with value bar. (Quicken does this). Of course, the Investment Summary Report also need this cost basis line. 3) In the Portfolio Report, if you add a graphic part that can be compared with some market index, (e.g. S&P 500, NASDAQ 100, etc.) then the user should be able to choose which index he would like to compare with.

Was a Quicken user until I recently changed from a PC to a MAC. After researching available home finance apps decided to try Ibank 5 on a trial basis. Was satisfied with what was offered after running parallel with Quicken. Would recommend to others. The only thing that I would like to see in any updates is the availability of more types of reports that can be personalized for my own needs.

Alignment off on lists and new entries. Month and year show up on new transactions, but day is blank (hard to pick an actual day with a blank list to choose from). Time to find a new product.

I was a longtime Quicken user, pretty much from their first version. When I switched to Windows couple of years ago, I kept using Quicken for Windows on my iMac because nothing else seemed as good for our home finances with investments. When iBank 5 came out I gave it a serious trial, running it parallel to Quicken for a couple of months until I was satisfied it would do the job for us. I was pleasantly surprised. The import from Quicken went quite smoothly, with only a few edits that did not take more than a couple of hours. I can download transactions outside iBank from our Canadian bank’s website and then upload them to iBank quite easily. Reconciliation is a snap. I like the Forecasting report. Reports work fine for me, in spite of the complaints of some reviewers comparing to Quicken. Especially nice that I can drag reports into Excel for Mac. Investments work fine for me. I am not a day trader, but I do like to monitor our portfolio carefully. Finally cut the cord to Quicken and Windows and managing our books is now much more peaceful. I ended up buying the iPad and iPhone apps. I don’t use them to maintain our iBank file outside the iMac, but I like the way they easily sync via wifi so I have the latest iMac version with me when I am out and about. I access our bank’s website when I am away from the iMac. I don’t give 5 stars easily. There are always small things that could be improved in most apps I use. So four stars means I am quite happy. UPDATE: I can’t get categories to insert automatically into transactions when I use file import. After much review on forums and the manual, I ended up contacting tech support. They simply told me to try downloading from within iBank’s browser, which I do not want to do. Just means I have to type in the categories manually when I update the accounts. (See UPDATE below: FIXED.) UPDATE June 2014: Six months in and very pleased with iBank on my iMac. Very easy to manually download and import statements for multiple accounts from my bank’s website in a single action, just need to identify which statement goes where in the import process (whereas Quicken was automatic). Only takes a few seconds. Reconciliation is quite easy, once I got the hang of it. At year-end I exported our accounts to QIF for my accountant, who uses Quicken. Gave up on the iPhone and iPad apps: could not get them to sync consistently and do not need them anyway. UPDATE: October 2015: Back up to 4 stars. I submitted a tech support request about the problems and they are all gone after some helpful back and forth and what seems to be a change on their end to better handle automatic insertion of categories on manual import from my Canadian bank. The bank inserts characters in all transitions that identify type of transaction, and now iBank’s import rules can handle them. Yay! (and thanks). I have been using their cloud sync since heir public beta and it has been rock solid. Also, running very efficiently under El Capitan. What would get me to 5 stars? Some refinements to reports, and better cheque-writing utility, and I can no longer drag reports into Excel. I only give 5 stars to apps for perfection, so by 4 I mean works great for me.