Banktivity 5 (formerly iBank 5) App Reviews

The upgrade from iBank 4 (which I loved) to iBank 5 is nothing but troubles and headaches. -Some of my scheduled transactions randomly just won’t post into the account they are supposed to; -iBank 5 doesn’t remember the link between my online accounts and their offline counterparts. I have to specify where to download my data on each and every dowload sessions. -The app crashes often -And now, each time I open the app, the « new user window » opens, prompting me to import an old file or to start new. -The mail I sent the company was left unanswered.

I was using Quicken on my Surface Pro 3 but when I switched to the MacBook, Quicken Canada doesn’t have a Mac version. So after some research I landed on iBank. I’m still learning the ins and outs but so far am pleased with what I see. Easy to use, updates nicely from my bank and easy to print checks. The only issue I am having is some transactions are dowloading from the bank in duplicate. Not a big issue, but important to do a daily download of transactions so the duplicates don’t get lost in the mix. I like what I see so far.

I’ve been a very long term user of Quicken in the PC world (through Parallels Desktop), even though I’ve been a Mac User since the mid-80’s. (The Quicken for Mac versions have always been crap). I’ve been watching for a good Mac financial management tool for quite a long time, but none have been interesting enough to overcome my SERIOUS inertia from the history I’ve built up in Quicken. iBank 5 looked to be finally getting there, so I decided to give it a shot. The transition from Quicken to iBank could not have been easier! Well done, iggsoftware. Some careful tidying up on the Quicken side in preparation, then a simple export from Quicken/import to iBank et voila! I’ve been using the tool for a couple of months now, and am very happy. I use it to manage my family personal finances, our rental property, our investment portfolio (Canadian and US components), and my wife’s sole proprietor business. The transfer went well, and I’ve seen no problems so far in my operations on the Mac side. If you are looking to get out of Quicken (and many are!) I do recommend iBank.

I switched from Quicken a couple of years ago. I started using Direct Access to download my bank and credit card transactions this spring. It has worked perfectly. A huge timesaver, very convenient. It’s frustrating that the banks only give access to the last 1-2 months of credit card data in download format, and I was often having to manually enter a lot of transactions, but now that it’s so easy to download them directly, I have saved a lot of time. I had started using iBank on my iphone, thinking I would enter transactions on the fly, but that is too cumbersome, so I just mainly use my Mac for bookkeeping now. I’m not sure if it will work with my business bookkeeping, I’m still using Quickbooks on the Mac for that but would like to ditch it and move to this if I could keep all my old transactions.

I like the application, but after paying $69.99 to purchase it, I discovered IGG wants an additional $45.99 a year to use it!!!!

Been using mint.com for a while. Sync with mint.com is flawless with all bank accounts. Enter ibank 5… half of my accounts do not sync automatically. Even if i do it manually, de balances do not match, and I have to verify every transaction, find the miscategorised transactions (deposits seen as expenses, etc) and adjust balances manually. I can’t believe I went from a free good service to a super crappy and very expensive software. By the way, email help is not helpful. Responses are slow to come and have not been helpful, the « we are working on a fix with this institution, meanwhile we have nothing helpful to say » kind. Will go back to anything else, 69.99$ poorer. I have never been so disapointed with a software purchase. Some poeple seem to like the software, but my personal advice is: DO NOT BUY.

If you want the program to work after updating from the IBank version you will need to restart the computer after the installation (Same for the IOS device)unfortunetly the programmer did not think about placing a remark in the update. Otherwise the program and app works beutifully with the icloud syncing

Had an old version of ibank which required PAID updates which were pricey. I never paid and it worked OK. Got a new computer in November so invested in a new version of ibank. Loved all the features. There was no indication that there were in app purchase and for $70 I would not have expected. In January ibank changed to Banktivity 5. You guessed it, they now was $55 a year to have syncing with my bank!! Guess you could consider this a downdate rather than an update ! VERY disappointed with the app given that it is a bottomless pit for which the consumer is not getting any improvements. So three months after purchase I am dealing with an unsupported app and I also note the price has been jacked up. BUYER BEWARE.

After the update, not only you need to restart your computer, also your saved icons to the dock will no longer work, so you’ll have to look for the app in the app menu, open it and keep it in the dock again.

A Win 10 forced upgrade is driving me off of ALL Windows products. I have used Quicken since 1992 and DOS. First time on this product so I was apprehensive. The conversion and import went fine (my records date from 1994). Not used to the menu layouts and had quite a bit of trouble with the reconciliation. The online help video showed me not to click the plus on the left but the “other" right plus which I hadn’t noticed! Duh! Now reconciliation works fine. Reporting is better in Quicken, particularly the differential comparison report of years. I use that annually to ensure effective spending and to measure my true personal inflation rate. Some more playing with the reports may help. Reporting is fine. If all else fails, I may resort to reading the manual. I don’t do online imports due to security concerns (on the business and government side), but am very pleased with what I have seen so far. Cost is excellent for the feaures.

Upon my switch to Mac I have tried several personal money management softs. None matched retired Microsoft Money in terms of functionality and adaptability. This one is the closest hit, but still lacks some important features (making account dormant, reports aren’t as comprehensive and easy, no mortgage account functionality). All in all, this is a good piece of software and to the extent you may connect to your banks via in-built managers, it will do its job well (I haven’t tried it due to my banks limitations).

Cloud sync stopped working

BUDGET, SCHEDULED TRANSACTIONS, DATES ARE MESSY. MOVING FROM IBANK4 TO IBANK5 IT DELETED ALL MY OLD SCHEDULED TRANSACTION NOT YET REGISTERED AND I LOST MOST OF MY UNPAID BILLS, BASICALLY ANYTHING OLDER THAN NOVEMBER 13 IS GONE! BESIDE THIS, VERY ANNOYING, THE REST IS OK, BUT I HAVE TO REVERSE TO IBANK 4 UNTIL THIS IS FIXED

I was a long time user of Quicken on both PC and then Mac, but between Intuit selling off Quicken and some serious problems with the Mac version, I was forced to find an alternative, and was not happy to disrupt what had been until recently an excellent system for managing my finances. All my research pointed to iBank as the best available personal finance software for the Mac, so I made the leap. And so far I have no regrets, and in fact wish I’d been forced into the move sooner. The app has very good functionality, and an excellent user interface. But as I made the transition from Quicken, I had cause to reach out to their support a few times, both via chat and email, and this is where iBank really shines. Every time I’ve had questions or needed assistance, they’ve been responsive and patient, working we me to resolve my issues and answer my questions. And they’ve also been responsive to feedback regarding ways to improve the software, already incorporating one of my suggestions. And the integration with their iOS mobile application is also very robust, making it an even better solution for folks who want the rich functionality and large display of a desktop application but also want full access to their financials when away from their computer. Highly recommended for those looking to manage their finances on a Mac.

I guess I missed that B of A cancelled support for OFX downloads. Since that is what I’ve been using with iBank, my B of A accounts stopped updating. I should have noticed this earlier, of course, but yesterday I noticed for the first time that my B of A accounts had not been updated in more than 2 months. The updates failed without warning and without error messages of any kind. This is completely unacceptable error handling. The web site has a “Support Article” that “an OFX listing … will only continue working for existing iBank customers.” I have no idea what this means. I see no OFX listing on the B of A web site. The automatic downloads using OFX have not worked for more than 2 months. Does the quote mean that OFX is listed as an option for B of A inside iBank even though OFX no longer works with B of A? If it means something else, I have no idea what. All I know is that OFX downloading is broken and iBank fails to warn me in any way that it is broken. Now, it seems, my only options are Direct Access ($) or “manual/Web download.” However, B of A seems to support a bunch of other data formats, e.g. two different types of QIF. I’m not keen to pay to download my own financial information, and I’m not looking forward to stepping backward to manual downloads after using iBank for a couple of years. Sure, B of A is primarily to blame here, but, frankly, it appears that IGG is more interested in making me pay for Direct Access than in supporting other automatic download options for the benefit of its customers. I understand the profit motive, but it still annoys me that I am put to this choice and may be forced to dump iBank. It was not an easy learning curve to be able to use this program. P.S. I fixed the problem by taking accounts offline and then enabling online access to accounts. (A couple of credit cards required manual downloads.) However, after a short period of working properly, OFX downloading again failed on all accounts without any notice or error message. When I took my B of A checking account offline and immediately tried to enable online access again, I got an error message that “The file ‘accountsData.ibank’ couldn’t be opened because it isn’t in the correct format. The file may be corrupted, truncated, or in an unexpected format.” When I tried to find that file using Spotlight and EasyFind, neither program found any file with that name. IOW, the solution that worked before no longer works. Because of this and other problems separately reported, Banktivity (formerly iBank) is completely unusable to me. I’m at wit’s end and looking at alternatives to Banktivity.

I downloaded this program after switching from a PC and Quicken to a Mac. Whereas all of my banks would previously automatically sync with Quicken, that was not the case here. I think I could have maybe resolved the issue, but I could never get anyone from support to return my email messages. I use this type of program daily, and now will have to find something else. A pretty expensive mistake!

I have used this app since version 3. The version 5 had been working for me and had synced well to my phone. I liked the interface of version 5. The latest update acted as if I was starting a new file and would not open any of my previous backups. Now everything is gone right when I need to be doing my end of year work. No help from online support. I would recommend that you look elsewhere— you can’t trust your finances to something that is this unreliable.

The latest update (5.6.4) does not allow me to import a 4 digit year QIF file from Bank of America. A dialog box appears with “Cancel” in the lower left corner and “Back” in the lower right corner and the iBank logo/watermark in the background of the dialog box. But there is nothing else present when there should be details about the transactions contained in the file. There are no error messages. My prior iBank version (4.7.5) opens the same file w/o any problem just as it always has. A competitor’s product also opens the file w/o any problem. A support tech via chat spent some time with me trying to resolve the issue but we were not successful. The first run of iBank 5 asked for access to my Address Book and I declined. There was no specific request for access to my Calendar. The support tech said access to Calendar was required but there appears to be no end-user method to provide access after the initial request is declined. She indicated she would file a bug report and attempt to get a QIF file from Bank of America to use for testing. I will need to continue using 4.7.5.

I was a long time user of Quicken on both PC and then Mac, but between Intuit selling off Quicken and some serious problems with the Mac version, I was forced to find an alternative, and was not happy to disrupt what had been until recently an excellent system for managing my finances. All my research pointed to iBank as the best available personal finance software for the Mac, so I made the leap. And so far I have no regrets, and in fact wish I’d been forced into the move sooner. The app has very good functionality, and an excellent user interface. But as I made the transition from Quicken, I had cause to reach out to their support a few times, both via chat and email, and this is where iBank really shines. Every time I’ve had questions or needed assistance, they’ve been responsive and patient, working we me to resolve my issues. And they’ve also been responsive to feedback regarding ways to improve the software, already incorporating one of my suggestions. And the integration with their iOS mobile application is also very robust, making it an even better solution for folks who want the rich functionality and large display of a desktop application but also want full access to their financials when away from their computer. Highly recommended for those looking to manage their finances on a Mac.

Updated to the latest version and within 2 days, started having problems. It worked well before the latest update and now you can’t trust it. It has changed my account balances for no reason. Luckily, its not syncing with the iOS version so my iPhone at least has accurate data. This is terrible and they need to get the old version back. I woudl not recommend the latest version……..