OK for basics, but will it just fail to launch one day?

Had used Quicken for Mac until OSX upgrade made it defunct. Newer Quicken versions are expensive and have poor reviews. I used iBank 4 for a few years until recently it just would not launch. Contacted IGG tech support. The ONLY support options are e-mail and live-chat (both ineffective, as stated by other reviewers). They gave me two options to regain access to my financial data. 1) downgrade my operating system so that iBank 4 would work (not!), or 2) purchase/upgrade to Banktivity 5. I chose the purchase over upgrade because I wanted to be able to do future upgrades through the Apple App store.

Importing the existing iBank 4 datafile was not as simple as they would lead you to believe. I had 46 pages of Banktivity 5 update import logging text to look through and spent several hours trying to correct existing balances in multiple accounts.

I do not do on-line banking and I use Banktivity as a tracking tool, so I will not comment on Direct Access optional payment options (the basic software is already expensive).

Got things working in Banktivity 5 and then made the mistake of entering 2 scheduled transactions. Be warned (it’s in the manual) that it will automatically add these items to your existing budget. (An odd way to handle this, in my opinion). When I tried to maintain/revert to my original budget total by subtracting the amount of the scheduled transactions from their budget category totals (in order to keep my original budget total what it was when I began), the software would not allow this. After deleting the scheduled transactions (Note that, due to a bug in the software, you can only remove them by deleting all scheduled transactions, thereby also losing the transaction templates), the only way I could return the category budget to the original annual total was to enter the annual number as a monthly one. If yearly was checked it (roughly) divided the number by 12?!

E-mailed tech support about this issue and also about not getting WYSIWYG when printing the budget. Ineffective again. After several e-mails they acknowledged bugs in the software that they are working on. When I suggested (in e-mail) that IGG should have tech phone support for things beyond the simplest issues, they suggested (in e-mail) that I should go to live-chat, after expounding on the virtues of live-chat versus phone support (According to IGG advantages are: generates a permanent record, and any tech person can “jump in”. They ignored the real reason, it’s cheap).

Bottom line. If you are staring from scratch on your financial database and use it for simple features, Banktivity is OK. Otherwise, be wary. One must have confidence that software will work and not just cease to launch, or function erratically. This is especially true for financial software. Finally, don’t expect much in the way of technical support.

Skippy R. about Banktivity 5 (formerly iBank 5)